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INTERNATIONAL CONCILIATION 


Published monthly by the 
American Association for International Conciliation. 
Entered as second class matter at New York, N. Y., 
Post office, February 23, 1909, under act of July 16, 1894. 





THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 


I. The Documentary History of the German Revolution 


II. Manifesto of the Spartacus Group 


III. What Should be Changed in Germany, by Charles | 


Andler. Translated by Grace Fallow Norton 





APRIL, 1919 


No. 137 





| 











AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR INTERNATIONAL CONCILIATION 
{ 
SUB-STATION 84 (407 WEST 117TH STREET) . . 

NEW YORK CITY 


—— ee as —_ eee —— rs 
li 


It is the aim of the Association for International Con- 
ciliation to awaken interest and to seek codperation in 
the movement to promote international good will. This 
movement depends for its ultimate success upon in- 
creased international understanding, appreciation, and 
sympathy. To this end, documents are printed and 
widely circulated, giving information as to the progress 
of the movement and as to matters connected therewith, 
in order that individual citizens, the newspaper press, 
and organizations of various kinds may have accurate 
information on these subjects readily available. 

The Association endeavors to avoid, as far as pos- 
sible, contentious questions, and in particular questions 
relating to the domestic policy of any given nation. 
Attention is to be fixed rather upon those underlying 
principles of international law, international conduct, 
and international organization, which must be agreed 
upon and enforced by all nations if peaceful civiliza- 
tion is to continue and to be advanced. A list of pub- 
lications will be found on pages 93, 94, and 95. 


Subscription rate: twenty-five cents for one year, or 
one dollar for five years. 


a a 
— enemas . 
T aes 


ae 








TABLE OF CONTENTS 


I. THe DocuMENTARY HISTORY OF THE GERMAN . 
BRE CLASS LON Me AA wes ete he thsi) a! bs ggaceti tala s 5 


II. MANIFESTO OF THE SPARTACUS GROUP... . 20 


IiI.. WHat SHouLD BE CHANGED IN GERMANY 
BV OHARLES ANDI E Brwrids ie ek alvin hase 26 





937 


I 


THE DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF THE 
GERMAN REVOLUTION 


Reprinted from The Living Age, March 1, 1919 


Many points about the making of the German 
revolution are left obscure by the accounts hitherto 
published in this country. It is, however, possible to 
reconstruct its history from the official and other docu- 
ments which have been published from time to time 
in the German press. This we propose to do, and as 
the documents are themselves of great historical inter- 
est and importance, we shall quote them in full. 

The first act or prelude in the revolution was the 
naval mutiny at Kiel on November 5. It spread to 
Bavaria on November 7, and broke out in the capital 
of the Empire on November 9. It is probable that 
Saturday, November 9, was deliberately chosen be- 
forehand to recall the Russian revolution of the pre- 
vious year. It is still uncertain to what extent the 
revolution was prepared and concerted; it was, how- 
ever, certainly not wholly spontaneous. The only 
statement which we have is one by the Majority 
party to the effect that their leaders were for several 
weeks in close consultation with the factory workers— 
a significant fact when it is remembered that the revo- 
lution was actually accomplished through a general 
strike of factory workers. The truth seems to be that 
the Majority party (and probably many of the leading 
Minority or independent Socialists) were, even as late 


[5] 


538 


as November 6, opposed to any revolutionary action, 
but as the military situation became more desperate, 
they attempted to compromise by insisting upon such 
drastic steps as the abdication of the Kaiser. On No- 
vember 4 and 6, the Majority paper Vorwdrts was 
urgently appealing to the workers and warning them 
against agitators, flysheets, Bolshevism, and “Russian 
conditions,” or, in one word, revolution. Then, sud- 
denly, the Socialist papers began to demand the 
Kaiser’s abdication. Even on the morning of Friday, 
November 8, the Socialist ministers, Ebert and 
Scheidemann, seem to have thought it possible that 
the revolution might be staved off by the Kaiser’s 
resignation, and they issued the following ultimatum 
to Prince Max’s government: 


Announcement of an Ultimatum to the Bourgeots Gov- 
ernment Issued by the Socialist Majority Party, Ex- 
biring at Midnight on Friday, November &, Demand- 
ing the Kaiser’s Abdication. 


Peace is assured—in a few hours the armistice will have 
begun. Only let there now be no thoughtless acts, such as 
would cause the bloodshed which has ended at the front to 
reappear again at home. The Social Democratic Party is’ 
exerting all its power to get your demands fulfilled as quickly 
as may be! 

Therefore, the Executive of the Social Democratic party 
and the Social Democratic Parliamentary party have put the 
following final demands to the Imperial Chancellor: 

1. Permission to hold the meetings forbidden today. 

2. Instructions for extreme caution to police and military. 

3. Abdication of the Kaiser and Crown Prince by Friday 
mid-day. 

4. Strengthening of the Social Democratic element in the 
government. 


[6] 


539 


5. Conversion of the Prussian Ministry to conform to the 
programme of the Majority parties of the Reichstag. 

If no satisfactory answer is given by Friday mid-day, then 
the Social Democrats will resign from the government. 

Expect further news from us in the course of Friday after- 
noon. 


THE EXECUTIVES OF THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY 
AND OF THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARLIAMENTARY 
PARTY. 

This ultimatum was to expire on Friday mid-day; 
as a matter of fact, the time was extended until Friday 
midnight. But in the interval events moved with 
great rapidity; and when, in the “early hour” of Sat- 
urday morning, the Kaiser at last consented ‘to retire 
into Holland, it was no longer merely a question of the 
resignation of Socialist Ministers, but of revolution. 
On Saturday morning many workers struck work spon- 
taneously, and at I p.m. the following flysheet, calling a 
general strike, was issued from the offices of Vorwérts: 


Notice, Calling the General Strike, Published in an Extra 
Edition of Vorwdrts, at 1 o'clock on Saturday, No- 
vember 9. 


GENERAL STRIKE. 


The Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council of Berlin has decided 
to call the General Strike. All factories are to stop. The 
necessary feeding of the population will continue. A large 
part of the garrison has put itself at the disposal of the 
Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council in units armed with machine 
guns and rifles. The movement is to be led jointly by the 
Social Democratic party of Germany and the Independent 
party of Germany. Workers and soldiers! See to it that 
quiet and order are maintained! Long live the Socialist 
Republic! 

THE WORKERS’ AND SOLDIERS’ COUNCIL. 


[7] 


540 


A few hours were sufficient for accomplishing the 
“bloodless revolution,” and in the afternoon motor cars 
dashed through Berlin with the following notice an- 
nouncing the success of the revolution: 


Flysheet Issued 1n Berlin on the Afternoon of Saturday, 
November 9, Announcing the Success of the Revolution. 


WorKERS, SOLDIERS, FELLOW CITIZENS! 


The Free State has come! 

Emperor and Crown Prince have abdicated! 

Fritz Ebert, the chairman of the Social Democratic party, 
has become Imperial Chancellor and is forming in the Empire 
and in Prussia a new government of men who have the con- 
fidence of the working population in town and country, of the 
workers, and of the soldiers. Herewith public power has 
passed into the hands of the people. A National Assembly to 
settle the Constitution will meet as quickly as possible. 

Workers, soldiers, citizens! The victory of the people has 
been won; it must not be dishonored by thoughtlessness. 
Economic life and transport must be maintained at all costs, 
so that the people’s government may be secured under all 
circumstances. 

Obey all the recommendations of the people’s government 
and its representatives. It is acting in the closest union with 
the workers and soldiers. 

Long live the German People’s Republic! 


THE EXECUTIVE OF THE SOCIAL DEMOCRACY 
OF GERMANY. 
THE WORKERS’ AND SOLDIERS’ COUNCIL. 


Then Scheidemann appeared on the balcony of the 
Reichstag and addressed the crowd in the following 
speech: 


[8] 


541 


Scheidemann’s Speech to the People from the Balcony of 
the Reichstag on the Afternoon of November 9. 


WORKERS AND SOLDIERS! 


The German people have won all along the line. What is 
old and corrupt has yielded. Militarism has yielded. The 
Hohenzollerns have abdicated. Long live the German Re- 
public! Ebert has been proclaimed Imperial Chancellor. 
Comrade Ebert is thereby commissioned to form a new govern- 
ment. All Social Democratic groups will belong to this gov- 
ernment. Now our task is not to let this glorious victory, this 
complete victory of the German people, be besmirched. 
Therefore, I beg you to see to it that there is no disturbance 
to the public safety. We must be able to be proud of this 
day forever. Nothing must happen which might later be 
thrown in our teeth. 

Quiet, order, and security, these are what we need now. 
The General commanding in the marches and the War Min- 
ister Scheuch, will each receive an adviser. Deputy Goéhre 
will sign all statements of the War Minister as well as Scheuch. 
It is, therefore, your duty now to respect all statements 
signed by Ebert, Scheuch, and Goéhre. See to it that the new 
German Republic which we are setting up is not interfered 
with by anything. Long live the German Republic! 


Prince Max handed over the Chancellorship to the 
Socialist Ebert, and announced the abdication of the 
Kaiser. But the Kaiser himself waited for nineteen 
days in Holland before signing his formal Act of 
Abdication. 


Act of Abdication Signed by the Emperor William II at 

Amerongen, tn Holland, on November 28, 1918. 

I hereby renounce forever the rights to the Crown of 
Prussia and the rights to the German Imperial Crown there- 
with bound up. At the same time I release all officials of 
the German Empire and of Prussia, as also all officers, non- 


[9] 


542 


commissioned officers, and rank and file of the navy, the 
Prussian army, and the troops of the Federal contingents, of 
their oath of loyalty, which they took to me as their Emperor, 
King, and Commander-in-Chief. I expect of them that until 
the German Empire is ordered anew they will help those men 
who hold the actual power in Germany to protect the German 
people against the threatening dangers of anarchy, famine, 
and foreign domination. 

Given by our own hand and under our own seal, 

At Amerongen, November 28, 1918. 

WILLIAM. 


The new government immediately announced its 
accession to power in a flysheet, and its policy in a 
decree, but its programme could not be declared until 
its composition had finally been agreed upon. Satur- 
day afternoon and evening were occupied by negotia- 
tions between the Majority and Minority Socialists, 
and the demands of the Minority and the answer of 
the Majority are shown in the statement issued by the 
latter at 8:30 p.m. Agreement as to the conditions of 
a Coalition Government were at last reached. It was 
to consist of three Majority Socialists, Ebert, Scheide- 
mann, and Landsberg, and three Minority Socialists, 
Haase, Dittmann, and Barth. This cabinet of six— 
they call themselves indifferently The People’s Com- 
missartes, or The Imperial Government (Retchsregie- 
rung), t. e., Central Government for the whole Empire 
—issued its programme on November 12: 


Flysheet Issued on November 9 by Ebert to Inform the 
Public that He had Taken Over the Chancellorshtp. 


The previous Imperial Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, 
has, with the consent of the various Secretaries. of State, 
handed over to me the conduct of the Imperial Chancellor’s 
business. I am in process of forming the new government by 


[10] 


943 


agreement with the parties, and will shortly inform the public 
of the result. The new government will be a People’s govern- 
ment. Its aim must be to give the German people peace as 
soon as possible, to secure for it the liberty which it has won. 
Fellow citizens! I beg you all for your support in the difficult 
work which awaits us. You know how heavily the war 
threatens the people’s food supply, the first prerequisite of 
political life. 

The political revolution must not disturb the feeding of the 
population. It must remain the first duty of all in town and 
in country not to hinder but to further the production of 
food and its transport into the towns. Want of food supplies 
means plunder and robbery, with misery for all. The poorest 
would suffer most, the industrial workers would be hit the 
most hardly. Whoever interferes with the supplies of food 
or other objects of necessity, or with the means of transport 
necessary to their distribution commits the heaviest sin 
against the community. 

Fellow citizens! I beg you all most earnestly: Leave the 
streets. See that peace and order are maintained. 

(Signed) EBERT 
Imperial Chancellor 


Decree Issued by the New Revolutionary Government on 
the Evening of November 9. 


COMRADES! 

This day has completed the freeing of the people. The 
Emperor has abdicated, his eldest son has renounced the 
throne. The Social Democratic party has taken over the 
government, and has offered entry into the government to 
the Independent Social Democratic party on the basis of 
complete equality. The new government will arrange for an 
election of a Constituent National Assembly, in which all 
citizens of either sex who are over twenty years of age will 
take part with absolutely equal rights. After that it will 
resign its powers into the hands of the new representatives of 
the people. 


[ii] 


544 


Until then its duties are: 

To conclude an armistice and to conduct peace negotiations; 
to assure the feeding of the population. 

To secure for the men in the army the quickest possible 
orderly return to their families and to wage-earning work. 

For this the democratic administration must begin at once 
to work smoothly. Only by means of faultless working can 
the worst disasters be avoided. Let each man, therefore, 
realize his responsibility to the whole. Human life is sacred. 
Property is to be protected against illegal interference. Who- 
ever dishonors this glorious movement by vulgar crimes is an 
enemy of the people and must be treated as such. But who- 
ever codperates with honest self-sacrifice in our work, on 
which the whole future depends, may say of himself that at 
the greatest moment of the world’s history he joined in to 
save the people. 

We face enormous tasks. Laboring men and women, in 
town and country, men in the soldier’s uniform and men in the 
workman’s blouse, help, all of you! 

EBERT, SCHEIDEMANN, LANDSBERG. 


Answer of the Majority Socialist Party to the Demands 
of the Independent Socialists Concerning the Basis on 
Which They Should Both Agree to Form One Govern- 
ment, Issued at §:30 p. m., on November 9. 


To THE EXECUTIVE OF THE INDEPENDENT SOCIAL DEMO- 
CRATIC PARTY. 

Guided by the sincere wish to achieve a union, we must 
make clear to you our attitude to your demands. You de- 
mand: 

1. That Germany is to become a Socialist Republic. Answer: 
This demand is the goal of our own policy; nevertheless, it is 
for the people and the Constituent National Assembly to 
decide. 

2. In this Republic the whole executive, legislative, and jud1- 
cial power 1s to be exclusively in the hands of the chosen men of 
the total laboring population and the soldiers. Answer: If this 


[12] 


945 


demand means the dictatorship of a part, a class, without the 
majority behind it, then we must reject this demand, because 
it would run counter to our democratic principles. 

3. Exclusion from the Government of all bourgeots members. 
Answer: This demand we must reject, because to accede to 
it would seriously endanger the feeding of the people, if not 
make it impossible. 

4. The participation of the Independents shall only be valid 
for three days, as a temporary measure, in order to create a 
government capable of concluding the armistice. Answer: We 
hold that a codperation of the Social Democratic groups is 
necessary at least until the meeting of the Constituent 
Assembly. 

5. The Departmental Ministers shall count only as technical 
assistants to the Cabinet, which alone shall take decisions. An- 
swer: We agree to this demand. 

6. Equal powers to the joint Presidents of the Cabinet. 
Answer: We are for the equal powers of all members of the 
Cabinet; nevertheless, the Constituent Assembly will have to 
decide on this. 

It is to be hoped from the good sense of the Independent 
Social Democratic party that it will achieve a union with the 
Social Democratic party. 

THE EXECUTIVE OF THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY 
OF GERMANY. (Signatures. ) 


Programme of the New Revolutionary Government, An- 
nounced by the Berlin Cabinet of Six. 
To THE GERMAN PEOPLE! 

The government which the Revolution has produced, whose 
political convictions are purely Socialist, is undertaking the 
task of realizing the Socialist programme. They now make 
the following announcements, which will have the force of law: 

I. The state of siege is abolished. 

2. The right of association and meeting is subject to no 
limitations, not even for officials and State workers. 


[13] 


546 


3. The censorship ceases to exist. The censorship of plays 
is abolished. 

4. Expression of opinion, whether by word of mouth or in 
writing, is free. 

5. Freedom of religious practice is guaranteed. No one 
shall be compelled to perform any religious act. 

6. An amnesty is granted for all political punishments. 
Trials now proceeding for such crimes are quashed. 

7. The Law of (compulsory) National Auxiliary Service is 
abolished with the exception of the provisions referring to the 
settlement of disputes. 

8. The Domestic Services Decrees become null and void; 
also the Exceptional Laws against rural workers. 

9. The laws protecting Labor, which were abandoned at the 
beginning of the war, are herewith restored. Further orders 
of a social-political nature will be published shortly. On 
January 1, 1919, at latest, the Eight-Hour Day will come into 
force. The government will do all that is possible to secure 
sufficient opportunities of work. An Order re the support of 
unemployed is ready. It divides the burden between the 
Empire (Federal), state, and municipality. In the sphere of 
sickness insurance, the insurance obligation will be increased 
beyond the present limit of 2,500 marks (£125). The housing 
difficulty will be dealt with by the building of houses. Efforts 
will be made to secure regular feeding of the people. The 
government will maintain ordered production, will protect 
property against private interference, as well as the freedom 
and security of individuals. All elections to public bodies are 
immediately to be carried out according to the equal, secret, 
direct, and universal franchise on the basis of proportional 
representation for all male and female persons of not less than 
twenty years of age; this franchise also holds for the Con- 
stituent Assembly, concerning which more detailed orders 
will follow. . 

Berlin, November 12, 1918. 

EBERT, HAASE, SCHEIDEMANN, 
LANDSBERG, DITTMANN, BARTH. 


[14] 


547 


The appeal to abstain from disorder so as not to 
imperil the food supply, which appears in these early 
documents, is repeated in a vast number of statements 
issued by every kind of authority all over the country. 
It shows that from the first moment of the revolution 
the new government were as urgent with their own 
people on this subject as Doctor Solf has been with the 
Allies. In a second appeal, issued by Ebert on the 
first day of the revolution, the statement is made that 
it is proposed to retain the bourgeois administrative 
services in order to avoid confusion and breakdown of 
supply. This is typical of innumerable other state- 
ments issued in other parts of the country. 

The question of public order was naturally bound 
up with that of maintaining discipline in the army. 
The lesson of the Russian revolution is shown by the 
new government’s determination to maintain disci- 
pline and the command of officer over private. At the 
same time, the old military system could not be re- 
tained, and the government defined the relations 
which were to exist between officers and men in a very 
interesting telegram to the High Command. The 
attitude of the Army Command in not challenging the 
revolution made the government’s path easier in this 
delicate and difficult matter. Hindenburg’s announce- 
. ment that he would coéperate with the Berlin govern- 
ment has appeared in our press; statements, for which 
we have no space here, show that the local military 
authorities followed suit: 


[15] 


548 


Telegram of the People’s Government in Berlin to the 
High Command, Defining the Relations of Soldiers to 
Officers and Regulating Military Discipline; Issued 
by the Wolff Bureau on November 12. | 


The People’s Government is inspired by the wish to see 
each of our soldiers return to his home as quickly as possible 
after his unspeakable sufferings and unheard-of deprivations. — 
But this goal can only be reached if the demobilization is 
carried out according to an orderly plan. If single troops 
stream back at their own pleasure, they place themselves, 
their comrades, and their homes in the greatest danger. The 
consequences would necessarily be chaos, famine, and want. 
The People’s Government expects of you the strictest self- 
discipline in order to avoid immeasurable calamity. We desire 
the High Command to inform the army in the field of this 
declaration of the People’s Government, and to issue the 
following orders: 

1. The relations between officer and rank and file are to 
be built up on mutual confidence. Prerequisites to this are 
willing submission of the ranks to the officer, and comradely 
treatment by the officer of the ranks. 

2. The officer’s superiority in rank remains. Unqualified 
obedience in service is of prime importance for the success of 
the return home to Germany. Military discipline and army 
order must, therefore, be maintained under all circumstances. 

3. The Soldiers’ Councils have an advisory voice in main- 
taining confidence between officer and rank and file in ques- 
tions of food, leave, the infliction of disciplinary punishments. 
Their highest duty is to try to prevent disorder and mutiny. 

4. The same food for officers, officials, and rank and file. 

5. The same bonuses to be added to the pay, and the same 
allowances for service in the field for officers and rank and file. 

6. Arms are to be-used against members of our own people 
only in cases of self-defense and to prevent robberies. 

(Signed) EBERT, HAASE, SCHEIDEMANN, 
LANDSBERG, BARTH. 
[16] 


549 


The last document contains the statement that the 
Soldiers’ Councils are to have “an advisory voice.” 
This brings us to the obscure subject of the Workers’ 
and Soldiers’ Councils and their relation to the govern- 
ment. The Councils are of two kinds: (1) true Sol- 
diers’ Councils, formed at the front and in garrison 
towns and including officers, and (2) Workers’ and 
Soldiers’ Councils, formed of civilians and those sol- 
diers who had returned home. The first gave a strong 
support to the new government, and demand, with 
that government, that a Constituent Assembly shall 
be summoned as soon as possible, and shall determine 
the future Constitution before any elaborate “sociali- 
zation of industry” is attempted. It is said by some 
that this attitude of the Soldiers’ Councils is influenced 
by the presence of officers in them, but it is probable 
that the returning soldier supports the Berlin and 
other governments because what he dreads is dis- 
organization and unemployment. The government 
obtains their support by promising employment and 
the rationing of work through an eight-hour day. 
This appears clearly in the following document: 


The Imperial Cabinet to the Returning Soldier. 


To THE RETURNING SOLDIERS! 


ComraDES! The German Republic heartily bids you wel- 
come home! You went forth for a country in which you had 
no say, in which a handful of men in authority had shared 
out between themselves power and possession. You were but 
allowed to be silent and to fight, while hundreds of thousands 
had to be silent and die before your eyes. 

Today you return to your own country in which no one in 
future has anything to say or to decide except the people it- 
self, which is now receiving you once more as members. The 


ba: 


J09 


revolution has broken the spell: you and we are free, Ger- 
many is free. Our Socialist Republic is to enter the League 
of Nations as the freest of all. And you are not only to find 
all the political rights of which hitherto you have been de- 
prived; your country is also to become your possession and 
your inheritance in an economic way, in that no one shall 
any more, with our consent, exploit you and enslave you. 

The Imperial government, which has been created and is 
being supported by the confidence of your comrades and of 
the workers, will get you work, protection while you work, 
and higher wages from your work. The eight-hour day, in- 
surance for unemployment, creation of employment, develop- 
ment of sickness insurance, the solution of the housing ques- 
tion, socialization of those industries which are ready for it: 
everything is in process, is already partly law! 

Come and be welcomed as the men who are to carry on the 
new Republic and its future. It is true you will find scarcity 
among us in foodstuffs, in all economic materials; there is 
distress and deprivation in the country. We can only get 
help from work in common, from action taken together. Only 
a Germany which has a government secured and anchored in 
the workers and soldiers can get from our previous opponents 
what you have fought for and longed for during four years— 
peace! 

Council of the People’s Commissaries, 

EBERT, HAASE, SCHEIDEMANN, 
DITTMANN, LANDSBERG, BARTH. 


It is feared in some quarters in Germany that with 
the demobilization of the army the true Soldiers’ 
Councils will cease to exist and all power will come 
into the hands of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, 
where the Extremists of the Spartacus group exercise 
such power as. they have. At the time of writing 
there has just been fighting in Berlin which seems to 
have left Ebert and the Majority Socialists still more 

[18] 


551 


firmly established in power. Conditions vary from 
place to place. In Berlin, from the outset, there has 
been some attempt to imitate the Russian Bolshevik 
theory, but for this men like Ebert, Scheidemann, 
Haase, Bernstein, and Kautsky have no sympathy. 


The International Review 


[19] 


552 


If 


MANIFESTO OF THE SPARTACUS GROUP 
Reprinted from the New York Times, January 24, 1919 


PROLETARIANS! MEN AND WOMEN OF LABOR! Com- 
RADES! 


The revolution has made its entry into Germany. 
The masses of the soldiers who for four years were 
driven to the slaughterhouse for the sake of capital- 
istic profits, the masses of workers, who for four 
years were exploited, crushed, and starved, have re- 
volted. That fearful tool of oppression—Prussian mili- 
tarism, that scourge of humanity—lies broken on the 
ground. Its most noticeable representatives, and 
therewith the most noticeable of those guilty of this 
war, the Kaiser and the Crown Prince, have fled from 
the country. Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils have 
been formed everywhere. 

Proletarians of all countries, we do not say that in 
Germany all the power has really been lodged in the 
hands of the working people, that the complete tri- 
umph of the proletarian revolution has already been 
attained. There still sit in the government all those 
Socialists who in August, 1914, abandoned our most 
precious possession, the International, who for four 
years betrayed the German working class and at the 
same time the International. 

But, proletarians of all countries, now the German 
proletarian himself is speaking to you. We believe 
we have the right to appear before your forum in his 

[20] 


553 


name. From the first day of this war we endeavored 
to do our international duty by fighting that criminal 
government with all our power and branding it as the 
one really guilty of the war. 

Now at this moment we are justified before history, 
before the International, and before the German pro- 
letariat. The masses agree with us enthusiastically, 
constantly widening circles of the proletariat share the 
knowledge that the hour has struck for a settlement 
with capitalist class rule. 

But this great task cannot be accomplished by the 
German proletariat alone; it can only fight and tri- 
umph by appealing to the solidarity of the proletarians 
of the whole world. 

Comrades of the belligerent countries, we are aware 
of your situation. We know very well that your gov- 
ernments, now since they have won the victory, are 
dazzling the eyes of many strata of the people with 
the external brilliancy of the triumph. We know that 
they thus succeed through the success of the murder- 
ing in making its causes and aims forgotten. 

But we also know something else. We know that 
also in your countries the proletariat made the most 
fearful sacrifices of flesh and blood, that it is weary of 
the dreadful butchery, that the proletarian is now ' 
returning to his home, and is finding want and misery 
there, while fortunes amounting to billions are heaped 
up in the hands of a few capitalists. He has recog- 
nized, and will continue to recognize, that your gov- 
ernments, too, have carried on the war for the sake of 
the big money bags. And he wiil further perceive that 
your governments, when they spoke of “justice and 
civilization” and of the “protection of small nations,” 
meant the profits of capital just as did ours when it 

[21] 


554 


talked about the “defense of the home”; and that the 
peace of “justice” and of the “League of Nations” 
amounts to the same base brigandage as the peace of 
Brest-Litovsk. Here, as well as there, the same shame- 
less lust for booty, the same desire for oppression, the 
same determination to exploit to the limit the brutal 
preponderance of murderous steel. 

The imperialism of all countries knows no “under- 
standing,” it knows only one right—capital’s profits; 
it knows only one language—the sword; it knows only 
one method—violence. And if it is now talking in 
all countries, in yours as well as ours, about the 
“League of Nations,” “disarmament,” “rights of small 
nations,” “self-determination of the peoples,” it is 
merely using the customary lying phrases of the rulers 
for the purpose of lulling to sleep the watchfulness of 
the proletariat. 

Proletarians of all countries! This must be the last 
war! We owe that to the 12,000,000 murdered vic- 
tims, we owe that to our children, we owe that to 
humanity. 

Europe has been ruined through the infamous in- 
ternational murder. Twelve million bodies cover the 
gruesome scenes of the imperialistic crime. The 
‘ flower of youth and the best man power of the peoples 
have been mowed down. Uncounted productive 
forces have been annihilated. Humanity is almost 
ready to bleed to death from the unexampled blood- 
letting of history. Victors and vanquished stand at 
the edge of the abyss. Humanity is threatened with 
the most dreadful famine, a stoppage of the entire 
mechanism of production, plagues, and degeneration. 

The great criminals of this fearful anarchy, of this 
chaos let loose—the ruling classes—are not able to 

[22] 


09 


control their own creation. The beast of capital that 
conjured up the hell of the world war is not capable of 
banishing it again, of restoring real order, of insuring 
bread and work, peace and civilization, justice and 
liberty, to tortured humanity. 

What is being prepared by the ruling classes as 
peace and justice is only a new work of brutal force 
from which the hydra of oppression, hatred, and fresh 
bloody wars raises its thousand heads. 

Socialism alone is in a position to complete the great 
work of permanent peace, to heal the thousand 
wounds from which humanity is bleeding, to trans- 
form the plains of Europe, trampled down by the 
passage of the apocryphal horseman of war, into 
blooming gardens, to conjure up ten productive forces 
for every one destroyed, to awaken all the physical 
and moral energies of humanity, and to replace hatred 
and dissension with fraternal solidarity, harmony, and 
respect for every human being. 

If representatives of the proletarians of all countries 
stretch out their hands to each other under the banner 
of socialism for the purpose of making peace, then 
peace will be concluded in a few hours. Then there 
will be no disputed questions about the left bank of 
the Rhine, Mesopotamia, Egypt, or colonies. Then 
there will be only one people: the toiling human beings 
of all races and tongues. Then there will be only one 
right: the equality of all men. Then there will be 
only one aim: prosperity and progress for everybody. 

Humanity is facing this alternative: dissolution and 
downfall in capitalist anarchy, or regeneration through 
the social revolution. The hour for decision has struck. 
If you believe in socialism, it is now time to show it 
by deeds. If you are Socialists, now is the time to act. 


[23] 


556 


Proletarians of all countries, when we now summon 
you to a common struggle it is not done for the sake 
of the German capitalists who, under the label “Ger- 
man nation,” are trying to escape the consequences of 
their own crimes; it is being done for our sake as well 
as for yours. Remember that your victorious capi- 
talists stand ready to suppress in blood our revolution, 
which they fear as their own. You yourselves have 
not become any freer through the “victory,” you have 
only become still more enslaved. If your ruling 
classes succeed in throttling the proletarian revolution 
in Germany, as well as in Russia, then they will turn 
against you with redoubled violence. Your capitalists 
hope that victory over us and over revolutionary 
Russia will give them the power to scourge you with 
a whip of scorpions and to erect the thousand-year 
empire of exploitation upon the grave of socialism. 

Therefore the proletariat of Germany is looking 
toward you in this hour. Germany is pregnant with 
the social revolution, but socialism can only be real- 
ized by the proletariat of the world. 

And therefore we call to you: “Arise for the struggle! 
Arise for action! The time for empty manifestos, pla- 
tonic resolutions, and high-sounding words has gone 
by! The hour of action has struck for the Inter- 
national!” We ask you to elect Workers’ and Soldiers’ 
Councils everywhere that will seize political power 
and, together with us, will restore peace. 

Not Lloyd George and Poincaré, not Sonnino, Wil- 
son, and Erzberger or Scheidemann, must be allowed 
to make peace. Peace is to be concluded under the 
waving banner of the socialist world revolution. 

Proletarians of all countries! We call upon you to 
complete the work of socialist liberation, to give a 


[24] 


5957 


human aspect to the disfigured world, and to make 
true those words with which we often greeted each 
other in the old days and which we sang as we parted: 
“And the International shall be the human race.” 


[25] 


KLARA ZETKIN 
RosA LUXEMBURG 
KarL LIEBKNECHT 
FRANZ MEHRING 


558 


It! 
INTRODUCTION 


Charles Andler has been, for the last twenty-five 
years, one of the keenest students of Germany’s 
inner politics. Being himself in close touch, at a cer- 
tain time, with the French socialists and their leader, 
Jean Jaurés, he may have been blinded as to certain 
conditions of European affairs; he has always, never- 
theless, been singularly well-informed respecting the 
evolution which characterized German socialism since 
the days of Bebel and Liebknecht. 

Born in Strasbourg on March 11, 1866, before the 
Franco-Prussian War, Charles Andler followed his 
father, an Alsatian pharmacist, out of his invaded 
province. After distinguished high school studies at 
Gray and in Paris, he entered the Ecole Normale 
Supérieure, with a strong vocation for philosophical 
work; his too radical views, however, are said to have 
prevented him from continuing along that line. He 
decided then to be a student of German literature, 
but kept always-a distinct liking for metaphysics, 
theories and systems. A longer stay in Berlin and 
some other German universities enabled him to know, 
otherwise than from books and newspapers, the main 
representatives of liberal Germany in the late eighties 
and early nineties. Asa high school teacher in Nancy, 
shortly afterwards as a maitre de conférences in the 
Ecole Normale Supérieure, Andler made rapidly his 
way to the Sorbonne, where he is now professor of 
German language and literature. 

[26] 


is he 


His doctor’s dissertation on Les Origines du Socia- 
lisme d’Etat en Allemagne (Paris, 1897), an original 
interpretation of Le Prince de Bismarck (Paris, 1899), 
were his first approaches at a description, and even at 
a prognostication, concerning German internal affairs. 
He certainly believed, in those days, in a liberating 
force which, spreading from the organized proletariat 
of Germany, would sooner or later bring over the 
world a peaceful and idealistic reform of economic 
conditions. His first discovery of different realities 
was late, but outspoken and unbiassed; in October, 
1912, then in April, 1913, he pointed out, in a news- 
paper article and in a political address, to what extent 
German socialism of the hour was imperialistic. An 
essay in the Revue socialiste (May, 1913) to the same 
point (“Ce qu’il y a d’impérialisme dans le socialisme 
allemand d’aujourd’hui”) brought him rebuke and re- 
proof from his French fellow-partisans. Andler had 
only shown, with texts borrowed from the leaders of 
German socialism and from the proceedings of recent 
congresses, that no real counterpoise, in many cases 
even disguised support and sympathy, was to be 
found, in a militaristic Germany of world-wide ambi- 
tions, in the main opinions of a party mainly interested 
in material ameliorations, higher salaries, and the 
like. 

The war has proved, on the whole, the correctness of 
Andler’s disclosures. To what extent his hopes for a 
sincerely liberal Germany (similar to that which, in 
1848, was unable to assert herself practically) are 
correct, has to be verified by the events themselves. 
But it may be interesting to note that, after the ad- 


[27] 


‘560 


dress which is given here in translation, Andler deliv- 
ered another lecture on the falsity of the first German 
“democratisation” (For et Vze, October 10, 1918): 
“La Démocratie en Allemagne.” 


F. BALDENSPERGER 
Professeur a la Sorbonne 


COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 


There can be no doubt that the tomorrow of Germany is one 
of the most critical questions of the moment. Germany will 
eventually take her place in the society of nations and in all 
probability as one of the great powers. The defeat of Prussian 
militarism and aggression has been absolute and overwhelming, 
and with the collapse of the armed forces has come a disruption 
of the German political system. The Germany of today is very 
different from the Germany which M. Andler analyzes so thor- 
oughly in the following lecture delivered on March 4, 1917, and 
yet it may be that changes effected in so short a time are more 
apparent than real. M. Andler’s article is, therefore, of distinct 
value in pointing out certain fundamental qualities in the German 
complex in 1914, which must be altered beyond question before 
Germany can become a member of the League of Nations, be- 
cause they are qualities which can not exist in a wholesome 
democratic society, and it is only upon a truly democratic basis 
that our society of nations can be secure.—The Editor. 


[28] 


561 


WHAT SHOULD BE CHANGED IN GERMANY 
By CHARLES ANDLER 


Translated by GRACE FALLOw, NorRTON 


Along with the general difficulty which we experience 
in representing to ourselves the world of tomorrow, 
perhaps the most thankless single difficulty lies in 
knowing how to make a place there for Germany. The 
German nation seems to us at the present hour a for- 
eign substance in Europe. It seems to us something 
which we can never assimilate. 

But in what way is Germany so irreducibly different 
from ourselves? Here we must be scrupulous to a 
degree, not to flatter the prejudices of the moment, 
not to cede even to the most legitimate resentment. 
We must not say things of which, after the peace, we 
should be ashamed and which we should have to re- 
tract. We must realize that Germany is in general 
on the same level of civilization as ourselves, and take 
that fact into account. She is our equal in all that is 
meant by science and philosophy, in all that is meant 
by general culture, and in all the principal arts. If 
this be disputed, let but Bach and Beethoven be heard! 

But the scandal of the world is that a people set so 
high in civilization should be thus responsible for the 
present war, for a war carried on with the scientific 
and premeditated methods of atrocity... . . How 
shall we explain this outrageous fact? I will anticipate 


[29] 


562 


my conclusions by telling you where I seek the expla- 
nation. Germany, although so profoundly cultivated in 
sO many respects, is politically the very opposite. She 
has neither the taste nor the talent for liberty. She 
does not respect in other peoples feelings and ideas 
which are not yet ripe in herself, or which have been 
smothered. It is none the less certain that Germany 
cannot enter into the society of nations until the day 
on which she does respect these things. 

A few weeks ago—to be exact, on the 24th of Jan- 
uary, I1917—there appeared a circular by the Prussian 
Minister of Public Instruction, Herr von Trott zu Solz. 
The minister said: “We must educate our political 
thinking; we must give a political education to the 
youth of Germany. It is of the utmost importance 
and urgence that we raise the level of our culture as 
regards our exterior politics.” 1 As one might suppose, 
what this junker especially wishes is the education of 
the youth of Germany in Germanism. Nevertheless, 
in itself this is an admission. The minister perceives 
that during this war there has been a sort of bank- 
ruptcy of the German intellectual preparation. He 
perceives that the Germans do not know the other 
nations. They have spread themselves among them 
in crowds; they have collected statistics; but in 
reality they always remained strangers, lacking re- 
spect, blindly self-confident. They did not bring back 
with them any deepened or psychological understand- 
ing; nor did the government attempt to spread such 
understanding. The paternalism of the ancien régime 
always assumed that only those directing the state 
were qualified to inform themselves concerning the 
affairs of the state. There was a famous phrase cur- 

1 Denkschrift tiber Forderung der Auslandstudien. 


[30] 


563 


rent in the eighteenth century concerning the “limited 
intelligence of the governed” (beschrankter Unter- 
tanenverstand). In our day we smile at the expression; 
it seems antiquated. Nevertheless, the state of things 
which it describes and criticizes still exists. 

If I picture to myself correctly the average Ger- 
mans, both the common people and the bourgeoiste, 
they: are people without vision, men of a limited hori- 
zon, strictly specialized each in his own work, for whom 
the days pass in methodical labor, without overwork, 
and strangely secure and regular. In the evenings 
they do not disdain a glass of beer, a game of skittles, 
or choral singing. Some find leisure for communal or 
corporate interests. Yet, excellent patriots, almost all 
of them, they feel no other concern in the direction of 
the destinies of this country which they love. They 
tell themselves that it is safe behind the most power- 
ful army in the world. They think the direction of 
public affairs is a trade like other trades, a specialty 
demanding an apprenticeship which the average Ger- 
man has not served. They consider that there are 
officials who have gone into this special study and who 
will toil with method, regularity, and patriotism to 
carry on these affairs. The average German has more 
confidence in the officials than in the Reichstag, be- 
cause the Kaiser has more confidence in them than in 
the Reichstag—the Kaiser and the government pass- 
ing as “above all parties.” They say this and they are 
believed! Nor is it to be questioned that the govern- 
ment has at heart the protection of the material pros- 
perity of the German people, as far as this is possible. 
It knows that material prosperity, particularly when 
conquered by the rude discipline and immense effort 
which the rapid economic expansion of Germany made 


[31] 


564 


necessary, puts every other preoccupation to sleep. 
The mass of the people has not time or does not care 
to demand political rights when collective energy and 
individual effort are exhausted in the immense work 
for which people and government know so marvel- 
ously how to combine: the work of the economic 
expansion of Germany. 

Meanwhile, what becomes of the internal liberties? 
And what of the external relations of the state? What 
use does the government make of the enormous force 
springing from the German people? The multitude 
takes no thought of this. Certain powerful leagues, 
the conservative League of Agriculturists, or the re- 
cent League of the Hansa, a more liberal organ of the 
great Jewish bank, have opened up a propaganda for 
economic ends. The Social Democrats made it their 
business to carry on in the press and in their public 
meetings a purely negative and theoretical criticism. 
Powerful enough in the city administrations, they 
claimed no title to the actual management of state 
business and their work of control was as devoid of 
sanction as is all the rest of German parliamentarism. 
“You have neither a revolutionary opposition nor a 
parliamentary opposition!” cried Jaurés to the Ger- 
man socialists at Amsterdam. 

Where then lay the political life of Germany before 
1914?. It was the privilege of those leaders to whom 
the German people had confided their destiny. It was 
confined to that caste of junkers who furnish the high 
officials just as they furnish the generals, and who 
sometimes associate with themselves talent selected 
outside, from among the specialists in law or in the 
technique of industry or finance. In order to escape 
control, up to 1907 this caste placed the greatest ob- 


[32] 


565 


stacles in the way of the liberty of the press and the 
rights of assembly and association. Thus the people 
of every class, from Germany’s great industries and 
her great commerce, her ancient and new middle class,. 
and her intellectuals—all remained politically without 
culture, in spite of the overflowing wealth of the 
country and the enormous progress in technology.” 

The unique political task and the duty par excel- 
lence of the good bourgeois patriots was to cry “Hoch!” 
at the passage of the court carriages and to decorate 
for those dynastic anniversaries which German par- 
ticularism furnishes in quantities every year in each 
monarchy of the Empire. If one was reckoned among 
the “high lights of society,” on these anniversaries one 
was invited to the usual banquet, dreaded for its dull- 
ness, where the “high lights” communed in a spirit of 
monarchic loyalty. And if any profound uneasiness 
troubled the German people, other well-known leagues, 
the Wehrverein, the Flottenverein, the general associa- 
tion of Kriegervereine, the Pan-germanist league, or 
simply the salaried press, would combine to stir up a 
roaring wave of chauvinism which would sweep all 
internal grievances away. Discord ceased at the 
approach of real or imaginary national peril. No one 
asked if there might not be certain men, powerful 
though few in number, whose interest lay in having 
some peril threaten from without, in order that they 
might be spared the sight of their power shaken from 
within. 

Here we have the main points proposed for our 
analysis. The question is: What part of the respon- 


2 Compare the picture drawn by Konrad Haenisch, “Die Politi- 
sierung der Deutschen” (Hamburger Echo, February 9, I917).. 
Haenisch is an imperialistic and majoritarian socialist. 


[33] 


566 


sibility for this war belongs to the German people? 
Should we distinguish between the government and 
the people? And are not the people, even without 
the responsibility of having taken the initiative, still 
accomplices because of their passive attitude toward 
the conduct of their governors? This is not easy to 
determine. The different social classes of Germany, 
unanimous in their aggressive furor, once the war is 
started, have not equal responsibility in the starting 
of war, because they have not equal power. 

The great political fact which has rendered Europe 
uninhabitable for fifty years is well known to us; we 
make no mistake in calling it by name; it is Prussian- 
ism. While her civilization came to Germany from 
the west and the south, her political formation came 
from the east and the north. Here is the truly tragic 
fact in the destiny of Germany. For it follows that 
the qualities and defects of Prussia have been imposed 
on the political life of the whole German people. The 
Prussian cult of the will—behold the sole moral 
quality come from the marches of Brandenburg! 
The Prussian incapacity for understanding and re- 
specting the preferences and liberty of those peoples 
with whom hazard brings the Germans in contact or 
brings into conflict with them: this is what Germany 
has learned from Prussia. The liberals of 1848 feared 
this robust, intolerant, intolerable Prussian will. That 
is why, though they were conscious of German unity, 
they considered dissolving Prussia into Germany. I 
am not speaking of the men of the extreme left, the 
republicans, so few in number, whose doctrines drew 
on a prejudice against Prussia. I am speaking of the 
moderate monarchists, such as Max and Heinrich von 
Gagern, Dahlmann, Rudolf Haym, Simson, Droysen, 


134] 


567 


and Max Duncker. These men would willingly have 
offered the crown to the King of Prussia. But on the 
other hand, they wanted Prussia broken up and to 
have Germany herself the mistress of her fate, in- 
stead of being ridden by that brutal and tyrannical 
cavalier—Prussia. 

What, then, are the effects of Prussianism in Ger- 
many? They seem to me to be three in number: 

1. The emasculation of the bourgeoisie. 

2. The strengthening of the bureaucratic and mili- 
‘tary state. 

3. The corruption of German science. 

When we have considered these three important 
points more closely, we shall have a more fundamental 
opinion concerning the possibility of distinguishing 
between the responsibility of the German people and 
the responsibility of their government. 


I. THE EMASCULATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 


The bourgeoisie that founded the great, free German 
cities of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, was a 
great bourgeoisie. In the absolutist period it had 
already declined considerably. By the eighteenth cen- 
tury, the country which in former times had almost 
broken up into a federation of innumerable republican 
‘cities is no longer recognizable in the monarchies of 
the south and the east and particularly in the Prussia 
of Frederick II. In Prussia the bourgeoisie was quite 
crushed. It made use of the military exemptions and 
privileges accorded by the king in order to enrich 
itself. Stein had confidence in its future because it had 
education, capital, and good manners and customs. 
But it demanded no rights and Stein’s political sense 


[35] 


568 


failed him in so far as the most important cities of 
Prussia, and even Berlin itself, resisted the Stadte- 
ordnung, introduced by him, which was the first 
chart of communal authority for the great cities. 

In the states of the south and west, the cities had _ 
been declining for three hundred years. Throughout 
those flourishing towns, where the sumptuous town- 
halls of the Renaissance and so many fine patrician 
dwellings had been built, German political incapacity 
and the stupid rivalry between neighboring republics 
had assured the triumph of the princes ever since the 
sixteenth century. For two centuries the palaces of 
princes had been replacing the old municipal archi- 
tecture. Cities were proud to become the “residence” 
of some prince-bishop. Thus the German bourgeoisie 
reaches the threshold of the nineteenth century, with- 
out political tradition and without pride. When 
Prussia overflowed upon the west and south in 1815 
and 1866, the bourgeoisie was filled with a respect 
without limit for the Prussian nobility of the sword, 
for the junkers, who had conquered it and conquered 
its princes. They rivalled the junkers and the military 
in their servility to the Prussian crown. In Prussia,. 
the bourgeoisie would perhaps never have been eman-. 
cipated without the aid of certain great aristocrats 
like Stein. Throughout the last century the principal 
leaders of the bourgeois parties in all the parliaments of 
Germany, were also aristocrats, converts to liberalism: 
such men as von Gagern, von Vincke, von Bennigsen,. 
von Hoverbeck. It would seem as though the burghers. 
themselves lacked the energy to defend their rights; 
but an enlightened aristocrat appearing in their ranks: 
was immediately recognized as a leader and imposed: 
his personality upon them. 


[36] 


569 


This alone is a bad sign morally. We should add 
that the bourgeoisie seemed predestined economically 
to betray liberalism. It betrayed it during two 
epochs: first in Prussia, in order to enrich itself; 
afterwards in the unified Empire, in order definitely 
to establish the power of big capital. 

Without doubt the Prussian bourgeotste was liberal 
around 1815. It had to break the ancient corporative 
mercantilism, the ancient system of guild mastership, 
and all those feudal rights which prevented cities from 
spreading outside of their walls. A wholly negative 
task which the Prussian bourgeotste left to its reform 
ministers to accomplish rather than accomplished it- 
self. But this task of economic liberalism once real- 
ized, the Anglo-French political ijiberalism went 
aground in Prussia. Prussian liberalism died of an 
internal contradiction which broke out at the time of 
the sad shipwreck of the revolution of 1848 and as a 
result of the constitutional conflict in Prussia in 1866. 
The parceling out of Germany, German particularism, 
Kleinstaateret, were the causes of the meekness of the 
bourgeotste. In order to break down the resistance of 
particularism, a strong force was needed. That was 
why the Prussian bourgeotsie counted only on its king 
and its army. But in the other states, especially in 
Wurtemburg and Baden, the bourgeotsie also cried for 
help to this Prussian army and this Prussian royalty. 
The manifesto of the Wurtemburger, Paul Pfizer, in 
1832, was prophetic of this evolution. Thirty years 
later, in 1866, the entire liberal bourgeoisie thought as 
did this bad poet, who was a very calculating oppor- 
tunist politician, and who, at a time when all the 
nations were rising in revolution, thought only of how 
to curb the German people beneath a discipline which 


137] 


9/79 


he wished to be Prussian. What likelihood was there 
of the success of the revolution of 1848, when on every 
side the bourgeoisie applauded the crushing out of the 
insurrections in the Palatinate and in Baden by the 
Prussian army? What likelihood that the conflict be- 
tween the parliamentarians and the militarists of 
Prussia during the period from 1861 to 1866 could end 
in a victory over Prussian militarism, when the parlia- 
mentarians were hoping for Prussian victory on the 
battlefields? 

However, must we say that the Germans have no 
democratic instincts? There is probably nothing older 
than this instinct in all the western peoples. Concern- 
ing the democratic character of the organization of the 
most ancient Germanic tribes, I do not believe that 
the historians Waitz, Sybel, or Dahn have lied to us.’ 
One can see the minister, von Stein, who, full of the 
idea of reinstating his people, preferred to live among 
the Westphalian peasants, “because they did not sa- 
lute him.” The Westphalian peasant does not salute 
his squire until he is sure that the salute will be 
returned. One can also understand the appreciative 
remark of that Prussian magistrate, Landrat of a 
Westphalian district, where, by the way, the vote is 
always given to the Catholic center: “They are red 
inside!” That is to say, internally revolutionary. 
But why has nothing ever come out of this profound 
instinct? If it is true, according to the assertion of 
Gierke, one of the most eminent German jurists, that 
German law is corporative, then the German state 
should also be corporative. It should be a free corpo- 
ration of citizens. The directing will of the state 


3 But it was a barbaric democracy which would be found as well 
among the Magyars or the primitive Slav peoples. 


[38 ] 


971 


should not come from an individual surrounded by a 
crew of military men and bureaucrats, but from the 
people themselves called together to deliberate their 
own destiny. That which has triumphed is, on the 
contrary, German constitutionalism. We must see what 
is masked beneath this apparently liberal term. 
What, specifically, is this constitutionalism, ad- 
mired by the whole German bourgeoisie and considered 
by German theoreticians, of whom Treitschke is the 
foremost, as the most perfect synthesis of authority 
and liberty, a sort of masterpiece of modern public 
law? Bismarck, after having created it, thus—too 
late—defined it: “My principal preoccupation,” he 
said to the students of Jena in 1897, “was to strengthen 
the crown.” Kindly remember this astonishing state- 
ment! In every other country “constitutionalism” has 
consisted in strengthening the guaranties given to the 
people and in augmenting the power of their repre- 
sentatives. There is one country in the world where, 
even before absolutism had been wholly destroyed, 
constitutionalism consisted in fortifying the royal 
power which as yet no revolution had shaken. This 
conception of “constitutionalism” is specifically Prus- 
sian; it is specifically that of Prussianized Germany. 
Do not offer the objection that Bismarck introduced 
universal suffrage into the Empire! If he had recog- 
nized universal suffrage as a right of the people, would 
he not have introduced it into Prussia as well? And 
since then, would the King of Saxony or the patrician 
republic of Hamburg have been permitted to wrest 
their franchise from the Saxons and the people of 
Hamburg? In 1867 Prussia needed a war-machine to 
break the last resistances of German particularism, 
especially in the south. The dynasties were not adapt- 


[39] 


O72 


ing themselves easily to their rdle of vassals, nor the 
aristocratic classes to their humiliation before the 
Prussian junkers. Bismarck broke them by “that war 
with revolutionary strokes” which he carried on along 
with the other war. His deeply hidden motive he 
afterwards expressed: he expected to withdraw this 
temporary reform of universal suffrage after it had 
fulfilled its mission. 

His last plan for internal politics was that project 
for a coup d'état wherein, after a rising during which 
the working-classes, artificially incited, were to be deci- 
mated, restricted suffrage should be restored. The 
crown, strengthened though it was, did not dare follow 
Bismarck that far. William II. himself did not wish, 
as he protested to his chancellor, “to wade up to-his 
ankles in the blood of his people.” Had royalty, built 
to be strong, suddenly become weak? Bismarck could 
not believe it. He began to think—too late—that 
perhaps he had made it too strong. We know from 
diverse confidences that during his last days two of 
his beliefs were shaken. He came to doubt, first, 
Providence, of which he had always believed himself 
to be the chosen instrument and which had abandoned 
him at the caprice of a young blunderer with a crown; 
and second, his own political doctrine. For in 1890 it 
was responsible for this monstrous thing: no one in the 
Reichstag dared question the government concerning 
the causes which had brought about the fall of the 
greatest statesman who had ever arisen in Germany! 
Behold where the system led which had tended exclu- 
sively towards making royalty strong and parliament 
weak! Thus the “German constitutionalism” created 
by Bismarck according to his own proportions, just to 
fit himself and his Kaiser, was no longer viable when 


[ 40] 


973 


the Kaiser changed. The system of “strong mon- 
archy” means more precisely the sum of personal 
confidence existing between a monarch and his prime 
minister. It supposes in the king the talent for choos- 
ing his minister well, and in the minister, a fidelity to 
authority, maintained against all odds. It can be 
conceived that Bismarck defended this exceptional 
position with a tenacity which stopped before no 
measure of violence and no base procedure. He de- 
clared whoever desired a less personal form of power 
to be “an enemy of the Empire” (Reichsfeind). For 
him, to be patriotic and to be for the government were 
the same thing. Bismarck always despicably insulted 
men and parties who did not think as he. He refused 
permission to officers who wished to marry daughters 
of families said to be “progressive.” In the presence 
of the venerable Rickert, deputy from Danzig, William 
I. could publicly ask the president of the province if 
he could not arrange to have the district of Danzig 
send to the Reichstag a “better” deputy! The citizens 
of Germany have, indeed, the right to vote. But let 
them take a fancy to vote for a candidate displeasing 
to the government and they will be treated as enemies 
of the country. Thus the government of Germany 
constantly tends to become once more a government 
of pure authority; whereas the spirit of modern con- 
stitutionalism is to institute governments of opinion. 

Will this opposition be possible for long? It could 
last as long as there was someone in a position, as was 
Bismarck, to draw on the moral credit which is given 
by great foreign successes. And so long as Europe was 
in that state of instability into which Bismarck had 
thrown it, one could always argue that danger was 
threatening at the frontiers. More than once Bis- 


[41] 


574 


marck conjured up an exterior peril, or the appearance 
of such peril, in order to be able to invoke it. His 
interior policy was this constant extortion practised 
upon German public opinion by the aid of exterior 
peril, from which he alone, because of his victories, 
had the reputation of being able to save Germany. 
Thus a constant moral constraint bent every will to 
his and, as a last resort, he had in reserve against uni- 
versal suffrage the coup d’état for which was needed 
only a monarch willing to “wade in blood up to his 
ankles.” 

This compromise between absolutism, limited by a 
constitution which embarrassed it but little, and a 
terrorized democracy which did not try to develop its 
constitutional rights—here is the system which lasted 
in Germany for fifty years! The least one can say of 
it is that it did nothing for liberty. 

Without doubt, the idea of the Empire had certain 
liberal origins; and during the ten years from 1870 to 
1880, or thereabouts, the legislation of the German 
Empire again had a false tint of liberalism. The vot- 
ing of the law of exception against the socialists in 
1880 marks the end of this liberal era and establishes 
the definite impotence of the German parliament. 
The bourgeoisie that betrayed liberalism between 1866 
and 1871, betrayed it a second time between 1880 and 
1914. Big industry, just coming into being, had al- 
ways looked for the basis of its power to a strong 
monarchy, which was to be found only in Prussia. 
Arrived now at the fullness of its strength, this great 
industry founded in its cartels and its trusts such for- 
midable organizations that it no longer needed to con- 
sider its task as a fight against power, but rather as a 
fight to achieve the conquest of power. This mon- 


142] 


975 


archic state, so strong, so concentrated, conjured up 
by the German capitalist bourgeotste because through 
this state it was to become great, was henceforth to 
be placed at the service of big capital. Now the 
modern economic struggle is no longer that simple 
competition which seeks to beat a rival in the univer- 
sal market by furnishing a superior product at a 
better price. It consists, in the first place, in export- 
ing capital, in investing it outside, within the new or 
backward countries, and in getting orders in their 
name. Whoever “finances” the construction of a rail- 
road of penetration or of a port, will also furnish the 
rails and other material, the construction of the piers 
and the electric installations. He will furnish the 
personnel of direction and exploitation. This new 
fight for markets is accomplished in great part by mili- 
tary and naval pressure. It is a fight for “spheres of 
influence,” preceding colonial conquest—to call it by 
its proper name. For this “imperialist” struggle, to 
which Germany has largely contributed its character 
of cunning and violence, the big industry, and the big 
commerce of Germany needed a military power that 
would be feared. They thought rightly that they had 
got the upper hand of the socialist opposition at home, 
either by force or by persuasion; by persuasion, 
rather, ever since the working-class has perceived that 
large salaries, short hours, and all the well-being so 
recently conquered presupposed the prosperity of Ger- 
man industry and hence the triumph of economic and 
colonial imperialism. 

It remained to be seen if the lower bourgeoisie would 
persist longer than the upper in its fidelity to liberal 
ideas. It furnished, through its small merchants, its 
people with modest incomes, its small proprietors, its 


[43 ] 


576 


artisans and peasants, the most solid contingent of 
the old Prussian Freisinn (progressive party) and of 
the Volkspartei of the southern states. And perhaps 
this lower bourgeoisie would not strike out of its pro- 
gram the democratic reforms which had constituted its 
ancient political creed. But if it did not strike them 
out, it ceased to fight for them. The small contractor 
defends himself less easily against the new demands of 
the working-class than does big capital. He resists by 
means of economies which pinch the equipment and 
the salaries. The average “philistine,” who in the pre- 
ceding generation was still the ally of the working- 
class, today hates social democracy because it brings 
discontent into all the workshops. Where shall he find 
an ally against this new and mortal enemy, Socialism, 
if not in the enemy of yesterday, Power? Thus even 
the most liberal of employers, who are the small and 
the average, seek the support of a strong monarchy; 
and if they do not love it, at least, they are careful not 
to pass as its enemies. Who then, after this desertion 
by the greater and lesser bourgeoisie, will carry on the 
fight for the defense of constitutional rights? 

Here, therefore, are the remote effects of that “Ger- 
man constitutionalism” instituted by Bismarck: 

1. No one holds any longer to the constitutional 
guaranties. The impotent parliament is abandoned 
by the most eminent spirits. The Parliament of 
Frankfort, in 1848, was proud because it numbered all 
those whom Germany considered its intellectual 
guides. The Prussian Parliament at the time of the 
conflict counted its historians and savants, like 
Duncker or Twesten, Virchow or Sybel. The assem- 
blies after 1870 listened to a Treitschke or an Adolf 
Wagner, besides those great liberals, Lasker and 


[44] 


ote 


Eugen Richter. Today the intellectuals are more 
concerned with directing the great factories than with 
defending, in a discredited parliament, rights in which 
they no longer believe. And it is the junkers who, as 
in that important matter of the canal from the Elbe 
to the Rhine, make use of parliamentary obstruction 
in the interests of their class. 

2. It is evident that a “strong monarchy” always 
favors the party which forms the entourage of the 
monarch. Logically, therefore, in England, after a 
change of ministry the personnel of the king’s house- 
hold is also changed. The English fear the influence 
of permanent cliques which might create disagree- 
ments between the king and his transient ministers. 
Why is there not all the more reason to fear that the 
political opinions of men surrounding the monarch 
will be decisive and formidable in a state where the 
monarch selects his ministers without having to ac- 
count to parliament for the reasons of his choice? 
This is the case in Germany, and in Prussia even more 
than in the Empire. There is not one instance of the 
Kaiser having chosen his ministers elsewhere than from 
his personal entourage. How shall we otherwise ex- 
plain why it is that for twenty years, and in an era 
when the democratic extension of suffrage has often 
reappeared in the foreground of the public interest, the 
Prussian Minister of the Interior has always been a 
junker? How does it happen that the other ministers, 
when they are of bourgeois stock, have always been 
chosen from the anti-democratic bourgeotste? 

3. Thus the government, entirely personal because 
of the prerogatives of the monarch, becomes more so 
because of the method which the monarch employs. 
He can never consent to strengthen parliament be- 


[45] 


578 


cause the system of a strong monarchy is incompatible 
with a parliament that decides. Or at least, a mechan- 
ism in which a strong monarchy is to be united with a 
strong parliament, would constitute a complication 
such that Bismarck himself dared not institute it. 
This is why either the monarchy must give way or 
parliamentarism must die. But a monarchy which 
accepted the decisions of a parliamentary majority 
would no longer be the Prussian monarchy that we 
know; should a parliamentary system take the place 
of the traditional system, the old Prussia would be 
dead. 

Whence came this parliamentary system? It did. 
not arise out of the constitutional quarrels which for 
fifty years have set Prussia at variance with the Em- 
pire. These antagonisms, wholly formal, have little 
interest for the rest of Europe. The political suffrage 
is universal, direct, and secret in the Empire. It is 
restricted, indirect, and public in Prussia. A voter, 
politically of age in so far as he is a citizen of the 
Empire, sees his political maturity denied in so far as 
he is a Prussian citizen. Nothing of all this concerns 
us. It is for the Prussian electors to discuss why they 
are considered stupider as Prussians than as Germans. 
One could invent a multitude of schemes for the reali- 
zation of homogeneity between the electoral rights of 
the Empire and those of Prussia; a return could be 
made to the liberal project of von Kardorff who, in 
1869, proposed that the Prussian chamber be com- 
posed of the same deputies whom the Prussian vote 
had elected as its representatives in the Imperial Par- 
liament. An analogous system might be suggested for 
all the German states. There is nothing contradictory 
in supposing that the Imperial Parliament is only 


[ 46] 


579 


the sum of the separate state parliaments, united for 
the deliberation of the affairs of. the imperial collec- 
tivity. 

All these reforms would remain formal and vain as 
long as it is true that every draft of an imperial law, 
even before it is submitted to the Bundesrat, where 
Prussia presides and is always in possession of the 
majority, must as a necessary preliminary be sub- 
mitted to the Prussian minister who makes a decision 
without parliamentary consultation. Sometimes it is 
difficult to reconcile the votes of united Germany with 
the votes of Prussia. Sometimes the former is more 
liberal than the latter. A virtuoso of parliamentary 
tactics like Prince von Biilow could sport with this 
difficulty. His government, liberal in Germany, 
turned conservative in Prussia. He always had the 
power, because he was accountable to no one. An 
equilibrist of great elegance, von Biilow distributed to 
left and to right the smiles which brought him unani- 
mous applause up to the day on which a draft of a law 
of inheritance, unimportant in itself, produced a 
coalition of the Catholic Center and the junkers. He 
was then shown—something of which he should not 
have been ignorant—where the real power lay; it lay 
in the conservative parties. 

Has it changed camp since the war? The people 
who have given so much, in toil and in blood, what 
rights have they in compensation for their sufferings? 
And what did the “Easter message,” issued by the 
Kaiser, promise them? One thing is certain, one thing 
authorizes hope: democracy alone is the power of the 
future! 

The industrial technique itself, by means of which 
Germany has’ built up her powerful economic empire 


147] 


580 


and her capitalist class so fearfully invasive, has spread 
education. The mind refuses to admit that the dif- 
fusion of knowledge does not result in the diffusion of 
the critical spirit as well. This work will be long in 
Germany because the German people is ever slow to 
change its ideas; because intellectual culture, for 
which it has such scrupulous respect, nevertheless 
remains specialized and broken into parts; and be- 
cause the Germans are not accustomed to control their 
leaders as long as they are being benefitted by the 
collective prosperity, of which, rightly or wrongly, 
they ascribe the origin and attainments to the prestige 
and solidity of the established system. | 
It is, therefore, not certain that German opinion 
will make an effort to induce Prussia to be dissolved 
into the more liberal Germany. It will put off making 
this effort, through indifference or complicity, because 
the strongest cement of the Empire has been this very 
industrial bourgeoisie, great and ambitious, which has 
spent all its energy in building up the “strong author- 
ity” indispensable to its projects of expansion. There- 
fore, it is for us, the Allied Powers, to assist in the dis- 
solving of Prussia in the Empire, by means of the war. 


II. THE GERMAN BUREAUCRATIC STATE 


A second important point, allied with the Prussian 
predominance in Germany, is the prodigious strength- 
ening of bureaucratic and military officialdom. If 
there is a profound pride in Germany, it is that of the 
body of officials and the body of officers. Which of the 
two is the more overbearing, the haughtier, the surer 
of its superiority, it would be difficult to say. A Ger- 
man officer is convinced that there is only one staff— 


[48 ] 


581 


the German staff. A German official is convinced that 
there is only one corps of officials which understands 
how to carry on its business and is disciplined and 
honest—the German corps. The corps of officials and 
the corps of officers have succeeded in imposing this 
conviction on the mass of non-Prussian Germans. 
That is why it follows them so blindly, after having 
abased itself before them with such cowardly acquies- 
cence. It has followed them into triumphs of which 
it has shared the intoxication and the profits. As it is 
to our detriment that they have accepted these intoxi- 
cating benefits, and as it is the lack of control by the 
German people of their officials that permitted the 
latter to loosen the universal catastrophe upon the 
world, we must inquire what these guaranties are, of 
which the public life of Germany is stripped through 
the fault of its bureaucracy. 

And here we cannot afford to be too disdainful. We 
are a bureaucratic people and we have been even more 
so. German bureaucracy is made in the image of the 
old French bureaucracy. From the Emperor Maxi- 
milian, who copied the bureaucratic hierarchy of 
Philip of Bourgoyne, continuing with Frederick Wil- 
liam I., King of Prussia, who copied the bureaucracy 
of Louis XIV., down to Stein, who borrowed the Na- 
poleonic framework, everything in the Prussian 
administration is of French origin. But the French 
have known how to break up the power of their body 
of officials. They hollowed it out from within. The 
Prussians consolidated theirs, by their discipline, by 
their methods of recruitment, and by the enormous 
authority which they conceded. The infatuated smile 
of a Prussian official or of a Prussian officer when he 
speaks of foreign officeholders or military men, means: 


[49] 


582 


it is in vain that you exert yourselves; we are the only 
ones that count, for we are obeyed, whereas, in your 
country, you are the ones that obey! 

This form of spirit is that of the old absolutism, the 
police-state (Polizeistaat) of the ancien régime. It was 
never a power without curb. It was well understood 
that under the old régime the administration realized 
the public welfare. At least, it tried to or pretended 
to. But it realized it without regard for any of the 
personal rights or for the consent of the citizens. 
It also goes without saying that this police-state has 
undergone transformation since the eighteenth cen- 
tury. It has become the Rechtsstaat even before be- 
coming the Verfassungsstaat. This means that the 
state has submitted its civil and military administra- 
tion, not only to the ideal ends of public good, beyond 
the understanding of its citizens, but to a posttive law, 
defined by a code known to all. The administration 
which is nowhere controlled by the parliaments, is, 
nevertheless, controlled by administrative tribunals 
established by itself. The arbitrary power of the 
officials, civil or military, receives at this point a con- 
siderable limitation. Nevertheless, it is not abolished. 
All that remains outside of the limits fixed today by 
laws not merely old, but also inspired by an old spirit, 
remains abandoned wholly to their good pleasure. 
This part of their arbitrary power, when we consider 
the police and the army, is prodigious. Though the 
principle of legality in administrative action is direc- 
tive and pedantically insisted upon, still it offers 
innumerable holes in its application; or rather, the 
kind of legality that regulates the administration is out 
of date. Of two methods, the one now preferred is the 
legal realization of the principle, leaving no place for 


[50] 


583 


arbitrary power. The idea that there are intangible 
rights of man and citizen is not unknown in Germany. 
It came there from France; but it remains as a 
stranger. Formerly there were conventions (that of 
Frankfort in 1848 and the national Prussian Conven- 
tion of the same year) which voted the Grundrechte. In 
the constitutions of almost all the German states the 
Grundrechte are inscribed. But this has never become 
the profound idea from which the governments have 
received their inspiration. There is no right of man 
or of citizen to which German law and practice does 
not make strange exceptions. 

1. Exception to the equality of rights. Equality before 
the law, which, according to modern thought is a pro- 
found right of man and of citizen, intends that public 
offices shall be equally accessible to all. This, indeed, 
is inscribed in the constitutional law of Prussia and of 
almost all the states. Nevertheless, if the electoral 
right is bound up with restrictive conditions of census, 
of landed property, of education; if numbers of muni- 
cipal or state elective officers are not open to all citi- 
zens, is there not here an evident infraction of the 
principle of equality of rights, an infraction all the 
better calculated to disturb the public spirit in that it 
is imputable to the law itself? 

And how many infractions have there not been, 
clandestine, cunning, complying with a literal but 
superficial observance of the law? No German really 
believes that all the citizens should be able to apply 
for all the offices of the state. The proletarian, humble 
folk, the liberals, the Jews, know that they would try 
in vain to climb to the higher rounds of officialdom. 
Doubtless in all countries the body of officials has a 
tendency to be closed, to constitute a caste, to be 


[51] 


584 


recruited only by nepotism. In Germany this miser- 
able esprit de corps is reinforced by social prejudice 
and all the political power of the state. It is useless 
to hope for codperation and advancement in upper 
officialdom, if one has not in youth been admitted to 
certain of those distinguished student-clubs with the 
multi-colored caps, which form the élite, if not intel- 
lectually at least socially, of the German universities. 
These clubs accept only the students who are rich or 
who are sons of families with a von; a spirit of con- 
servatism and of Prussian megalomania is maintained 
which is agreeable to the authorities. To all the force 
of friendships clinched by drinking-bouts and common 
studies, there is thus added the force of the bond of 
caste and of social prejudices kept up throughout a 
lifetime. Behold why the members of these student- 
clubs offer such strong pledges of loyalty! As long as 
there are more candidates for the state-offices than 
there are vacant posts, why should not the military 
and civil administrations be masters of their choice? 
They choose out of that narrow freemasonry of the 
old Korpsstudenten, among whom relationships are 
begun in youth and complete the bond of distinguished 
cousinship. Nota high office in the diplomatic service 
or in the magistracy or in the upper administra- 
tion, which does not belong in advance to these Jaba- 
dens of the “corps;” and their taste for full-dress-cere- 
monials, their mania for pompous discourses and 
sumptuous horseback parading, their habit of building 
costly mansions to harbor their gatherings—all this 
solemn snobbism so surprising in very young people, is 
only the affirmation, insolently published before the 
population, of ambitions in reserve for the future. But 
the state, by its public encouragement and by a favor- 


[52] 


585 


itism which is the tradition of all its administrations, 
maintains and encourages these schools of conserva- 
tive and narrow fanaticism. It follows that a demo- 
cratic policy would have for its first object to discredit 
them, to dry up their recruitment by suppressing the 
exorbitant privileges which are attached to candida- 
tures of this origin in all the professions. 

2. Exceptions to the right of assembly and association. 
The liberty of assembly and association is a right of 
man and of citizen. It is a right codified in Germany 
by the laws of which the latest date is 1908. It should 
never be limited except by the simple practical guar- 
anties required by public order. Nevertheless, there is 
evidence that the German government does not recog- 
nize this simple notion of modern rights. Shreds of it 
are obtained by main force, only to fall back again into 
the paternalism of the ancien régime. The German 
authorities, especially in Prussia, never cease thinking 
vaguely that there is something illicit in the mere facts 
of associating and meeting. Not only is the adminis- 
tration occupied with watching everything that is 
plotted between people who are not of the adminis- 
tration and who, therefore, have not the right to mix 
in politics, but it also believes that it has the right to 
know and control the particular attitude of each citi- 
zen. How otherwise would it come about that young 
people of from eighteen to twenty should be expressly 
excluded from every right of assembly and association? 
Note that it is demanded of these young men that they 
die for their country. The destiny of their country is 
put back within their hands on the field of battle. 

. But they are refused the right of discussing 
this destiny in meetings. As though this interdiction 
did not have for immediate effect the encouragement 


[53 ] 


586 


of a clandestine propaganda, just as agitating but of 
necessity more acrimonious and less controllable than 
public propaganda! 

There is another curious feature which testifies to 
the persistence of this ancient patrimonial law. The 
right of assembly and association is guaranteed to the 
major citizens by law. But it is not guaranteed except 
in relation to the state. It is no longer guaranteed if it 
interferes with obligations which the German citizen 
contracts by virtue of other engagements. A German 
official may, indeed, possess theoretically the right of 
assembly and association: but his hierarchic chiefs 
may prevent his being present at any meeting or being 
made a member of any association which they consider 
prejudicial to discipline or monarchic loyalism. <A 
salaried German employee also possesses theoretically 
the right of assembly and association. But his em- 
ployer can by contract forbid him to make use of it. 
This right of the employer is not even disputable at 
law. It is confirmed by a faithful jurisprudence. The 
workingman or officeholder must prove that, without 
the right of meeting or of combining to the use of 
which he lays claim, he would suffer serious injury, 
authorizing him to break his working contract or to 
ignore the interdiction of his chief. A long lawsuit, 
civil or administrative, which few people face because 
the decision which will terminate it, is only too certain. 
Thus the exercise even of the rights guaranteed by the 
state can be hindered by a private abusive right of a 
third person. But as this right of the third person 
favors the traditional discipline, the state never dreams 
of introducing any restriction. 

3. Much is said about German decentralization. It 
is certain that German particularism prevents the 


[54] 


587 


uniform administration of the whole Empire. In 
Prussia, to make it worse, the cities have communal 
liberties. Germany has often gloried in this. One 
would think that this communal law would be a safe- 
guard of German liberties. But state officialdom 
crushes everything. The president of the province 
and the Landrat of Prussia must watch over the com- 
munes. These men imagine it to be their duty to 
prevent the state from breaking up into independent 
cities, just as though we were still in the time of the 
Renaissance. They are inspired by that false belief 
that the city gets its authority from the state. They 
cannot rid themselves of the idea that the communes 
are taking an unfair advantage when they try to live 
an independent existence. They take all sorts of 
meddling, oppressive, and vexatious measures, which 
discourage civic spirit and the interest which the citi- 
zens might bring to the administration of the com- 
munes. “It is an unhappy consequence of bureau- 
cratism that, in the domain of self-government, the 
surveillance of the state becomes in many cases an 
administration by the state which has encroached 
even upon the details of the internal workings.” The 
historian, Walter Lotz, well known to German official- 
dom, thus expressed himself many years ago. A for- 
mer president of a province, von Arnstedt, more 
recently added: “If the surveillance by the state is 
not needlessly to hinder communal life, if it is not to 
be more harmful than helpful. . . I believe, after 
long experience, that I can assert that there is urgent 
need of restraining it.” Nevertheless, Prussian abso- 
lutism begins the faults of the French monarchy all 
over again. It shatters the corporate liberties which 
alone, by a delegation come from beneath, can found 


[55] 


588 


the authority of the state in so far as the state is not 
a mere assemblage of citizens but an organized col- 
lectivity. 

4. The state has thus for skeleton a body of officials, 
rigorously selected, which appreciates neither the 
rights of citizens nor communal liberties. This body 
of officials culminates in turn in a caste which is the 
model of all right-minded Germans of high rank—the 
military caste. This caste gives its tone to society. 
The officers, tightly corseted, padded, powdered, flat- 
tered, establish the standard of elegance and fine 
manners. This is not the place to say by how many 
economic advantages and exterior honors the social 
preéminence of this caste is assured. It will be suff- 
cient to recall that it enjoys exorbitant privileges as re- 
gards the law. It has often been pointed out how far 
these men are out of the reach of justice. One of the 
chiefs of the Center, Erzberger, created a stir by 
denouncing in the Reichstag an advancement given to 
a captain charged with 1,500 acts of serious brutality. 
Everybody remembers that German officer who was 
struck by the escort of a lady whom he had just in- 
sulted. He killed the civilian like a dog and the courts 
acquitted the assassin because he was an officer.* 
Above society, above all the conventions and all the 
laws, there is thus a social élite which obeys none but 
its own conceptions of honor and which recognizes 
none but its own laws. Not only is this caste not 
generally responsible to the civil jurisdiction, not only 
is it generally unpunished for offenses which in civil 
life would bring penalties and serious disqualifications, 
but it constantly influences the application of the law 


4 This was excellently set forth in Joseph Barthelemy, “Les tnstitu- 
tions politiques de L’ Allemagne contemporaine, 1915, pp. 220-231. 


[56] 


589 


by the magistracy as well. There are no suits between 
civilians and the military in which the commandants 
of army corps do not permit themselves—even though 
the civilians are condemned—indiscreet interventions 
in the courts and complaints either about the quality 
of the punishment or the wording of the judgment. 
So that the least that we can say is that the abusive 
interventions of the military authorities in the carry- 
ing out of justice, which in any other country would 
incur punishment, ought to be resented by the magis- 
trates and publicly branded. But there is no example 
of such an act of independence in the civil magistracy 
of Germany. 

In a state where all the powers are absorbed by the 
executive, it is the normal thing for the military power 
not to give way to the judiciary power. The German 
nation is the creation of the army just as the army 
itself, as Bismarck said, is the creation of the Prussian 
monarchy. The government must, therefore, be mili- 
tary; and when there is a conflict between two sorts 
of rights, two sorts of ideas of honor, two sorts of inter- 
ests, the interests, ideas, and rights of the military pre- 
vail over every other necessity. “There are not two 
kinds of ethics for an officer, that of conscience and 
that of the will of the Kaiser,” said General von Einem, 
Minister of War. The will of the Kaiser takes the 
place of conscience; and his will is that the esprit de 
corps of his officers should never endure humiliation. 
“In the army”, said William II., “there is only one will 
and that is my will.” This gives to the whole military 
caste the feeling that it participates in the sovereign 
prerogatives. The German people accepts this state 
of things for it considers the army, conducted accord- 
ing to these principles by a corps of officers also pro- 


157] 


990 


foundly imbued with the idea of social invulnerability, 
as a school where decision, discipline, and a talent for 
organization are learned. These qualities applied to . 
business have made Germany the predominant nation 
of Europe. Between the success which Germany owes 
to these qualities and the sacrifices which assured her 
success, the people have not hesitated, even when it 
came to sacrificing their liberties. 

When we place Germany in opposition to the allied 
nations, it appears that the irreducible antagonism be- 
tween her and ourselves is not merely and not pre- 
eminently a difference between a democratic parlia- 
mentary constitution and a monarchic semi-absolutist 
constitution. The antagonism is more precisely de- 
fined as an antithesis between the democratic state and 
the bureaucratic state. Germany is a state in which the 
public services are directive and are not directed. 
France and England are states in which the public 
services receive their impulsion from the opinion and 
interests of the nation which they serve. 

German bureaucracy and militarism are closed or- 
ganizations, conducted from above. The officials and 
military men constitute a “lay-clergy of governors,”® 
solidly united against those whom they govern. Be- 
cause of this nomination and superintendence from 
above, these officials and officers are lastingly depen- 
dent on the government. Parliament has no power of 
control over their nominations or superintendence, and 
the government averts with care every tentative 
toward control. In France and England this parlia- 
mentary control exists; and although it is true that 
it tends to interfere excessively in the nominations, it 

5 See the eminent Swiss jurist, Otto Fleiner, in Festgabe fir Otto 
Mayer. 1910. ; 

[58] 


oo! 


is none the less, when restrained within just limits, a 
guaranty given to the public against the predomi- 
nance of officials. So the French and English officers 
and officials remain open to democratic sentiment. 
They feel themselves to be the servants of a powerful 
collectivity of which they try to understand and obey 
the voice. In Germany the official has his roots only 
in the corporation which opens advancement to him 
to the very top, and in the social caste from which his 
class is recruited. He takes on the qualities and ideas 
of the corporation. No one disputes the unity of will, 
the professional conscience, and the ability of the 
German official and military caste. The dangers of 
the German system are excessive specialization, nar- 
rowness of spirit, a prodigious snobbery, and methods 
of authority unnecessarily vexatious and meddlesome, 
impersonal and indifferent to. the preferences of those 
to whom they are administered. 

The higher French officialdom has not got rid of a 
bad mechanism. It willingly lets some of its regula- 
tions sleep. We laugh a little at its routine, made up 
of customs dear to the public, which no one likes to 
disturb. In other respects the superiors of the French 
administration like to appear benevolent, a bit scep- 
tical, fluent and brilliant. . . They do not bother 
any one. They are slightly patronizing. They love 
to give the impression that they are superior to their 
office, and this pose, into which some vanity enters, 
springs none the less from their regard for the intelli- 
gence of the persons under their administration, whose 
tastes they are considering. 

Thus, in France and in England, public opinion is 
mistress of the state; and the rights of the individual 
are, at least in theory, the source of the social authority 


[59] 


592 


charged with their defense. In Germany, the rights 
of the individual are not recognized even in theory. 
It is all positive right (droit positif). The task to 
which the official applies himself is a task prescribed 
by the government. It must be carried out with de- 
tail and precision. The civil and military bureau- 
cracy does not feel constrained to inform any one of 
its acts. Its work is strictly secret. When its deci- 
sions are made known, it is too late! They are carried 
out without any notice having been given. It would 
not be parliamentary control that could cause their 
withdrawal—it would be public detriment alone. And 
public detriment, we know well, is never the detri- 
ment of the directing classes. 

What remedy is there for all this? I will explain by 
means of a fable. We have in France an upper and 
middle administration conspicuous for its intelligence. 
It is perhaps the lower officials who work less well.and 
in the more begrudging manner. This is because they 
have the minds of leaders who weary of the too highly 
specialized and monotonous duties of the lower grades. 
Superintended rather nonchalantly by their superiors, 
who let the reins hang loose, they are only tolerably 
zealous in their work. Suppose we imagine an ex- 
change. If we were to take the highest German 
officials, the presidents of providences, the com- 
mandants of army corps, the Landrdte, and confide to 
them the receiverships in our bureaus and the places 
in our lower administration, they would do good work. 
Scrupulous to a degree, they would annoy our officials 
of the lower grades a good deal. On the other hand, 
place our post-office collectors, under station masters, 
and policelieutenants in the German states as presidents, 
and in the prefectures and high military commands! 

[ 60 ] 


293 


Their spirit of generalization would be satisfied. 
Their taste for a position of authority, demand- 
ing intelligence, but somewhat aloof, would be flat- 
tered. Both nations would gain by this exchange. 
Look at all this as ata symbol. For I am speaking of 
a transformation of spirit, or at least of a change 
brought to bear on the formation of the social struc- 
tures of both nations. 
* * * 

But what interest should we have in such a muta- 
tion? Isit not a matter of indifference to us, after all, 
that Germany has an oppressive bureaucracy, socially 
out of date? No, it is not a matter of indifference 
when the whole social body of Germany is modeled, 
directed, and inspired by this bureaucracy and this 
militarism! Now, the contempt which the German 
officials and officers have for the German citizens and 
their collectivities, they also have for foreigners and 
the other nations. Further, the reasons for which the 
German governments hinder liberty within are rea- 
sons of exterior politics. “No one has ever seen a 
world-power (Weltmacht) with a liberal government,” 
said Bismarck. It was, therefore, in order to become a 
Weltmacht that Germany smothered her liberty at 
home. All the nations are greatly interested in know- 
ing whether or not a change has taken place in the 
internal constitution of Germany, because such a 
change will be the indication of a modified external ' 
policy. 

The ministerial circular of von Trott zu Solz (1917) 
demanded, as particularly urgent, a reform of German 
political culture in the domain of foreign politics (am 
dringlichsten, die aussenpolitische Bildung). \mmedi- 
ately the German universities began to give instruc- 

[61] 


594 


tion in foreign affairs. Kiel is specializing in the study 
of the transpacific and transatlantic countries. 
K6nigsberg has chosen to study the Slavic countries. 
Bonn will occupy itself with France and Belgium. It 
is doubtful whether a preparation inspired by the 
ministerial junker, von Trott zu Solz, will turn this 
instruction. which is to be given to the youth of Ger- 
many in the direction of liberalism.® 

It is commonly believed that the Gernetite are more 
in touch with foreign affairs than other peoples. This 
is a profound error. With regard to the problems of 
foreign politics, the idea of the people is to trust to 
the government and to its fist. The Germans who 
were established in foreign countries invoked this fist 
at the least difficulty which their arrogance, their dis- 
honesty, or their greed, caused them. Those at home 
could not conceive of relations with other countries 
except as an uninterrupted series of very vigorous 
pressures brought to the support of subtle extortion- 
ate manceuverings. All this was done in the secrecy 
of the ministries. It is impossible to imagine the 
amount of hatred that Germany has accumulated 
against herself in every country by this constant and 
vicious meddling. But the parliament controlled 
nothing of this, did not wish to control it; and if the 
people were not satisfied, it was only because of the 
insufficient energy of this governmental strategy. 
Once or twice a year, Herr Bassermann, leader of lib- 


6 These words were delivered before the fall of Herr von Trott zu 
Solz, who resigned because he would not accept the prospect of uni- 
versal suffrage in Prussia. They are equally true of his successor, 
Herr Schmidt, who, though he was director of the beaux-arts, would 
never consent to take a journey to Paris. He is the son of the former 
director of public worship, Herr Schmidt, who once took such brutal 
inquisitorial measures against the pastor Goehre, converted to social- 
ism, necessitating the resignation of the latter. 

[62] 


995 


eral and imperialist nationalism, would put to the 
Reichstag a question expressed in dignified terms, 
arranged with the chancellor. The government would 
respond with commonplaces. This rite accomplished, 
the ordinary train of affairs would continue. The 
social-democrats were particularly poverty-stricken 
when it came to specialists in foreign politics. Before 
their deaths, the elder Liebknecht, then Bebel, and in 
our days Gradnauer, sometimes risked a question. 
They were put off. In short, the government ar- 
ranged matters so that no profane touch should 
trouble the occult geometry of its foreign politics. 

The inconvenience was the more serious because no 
social caste was ever less capable of foreign politics 
than the junkers of Prussia. It is saying little to call 
them infatuated; they did not even know enough to 
discern their own interests. Even in 1870 they fought 
the German Empire and German unity under the pre- 
text that it was a “Jewish affair.” Bismarck was 
enough of an economist to know that private interests, 
and those of the junkers as well, would gain by the 
transaction. But even he did not understand any- 
thing of the power of liberal ideas; he was never able 
to comprehend why the England of Gladstone had 
been able to found the most powerful colonial empire 
that had ever existed. The most profound error of 
the German diplomats of 1914—Prussian junkers, all 
of them—lay in underestimating the liberal powers of 
Belgium, France, England, and Italy,’ because none 
of these had the state of mind nor possessed the equip- 
ment which a war of aggression necessitates. 

The German state being essentially a bureaucratic 
and military state, its diplomacy is one of the highest 

7 Today we must add the United States. | 

[ 63 ] 


596 


selections of its bureaucracy, directed by the military 
spirit. More than any other body of diplomats, the 
German diplomats form a corporation moulded and 
recruited by exclusive considerations of fortune, ap- 
pearance, and the imperial good pleasure. More than 
any other bureaucracy, the German diplomatic service 
acts in secret. If the methods of European diplomacy 
have been against all reform, all control by public 
opinion, it is because the secrecy of negotiations has 
never been insisted upon with as much strictness as by 
Wilhelmstrasse since 1870. The Moroccan negotia- 
tions of 1911—do we not still remember them? And 
how that secret procedure imposed for so long a 
period was a systematic method of shaking our nerves 
and of forcing us to capitulate at last through impa- 
tience. When the intrigue to bring on war between 
Mexico and the United States, contrived in Germany 
in I915—I916, was brought to light, did not the only 
disapprobation manifested by the German leaders 
consist in being outraged over the premature divulga- 
tion of a secret which thus injured Germany? 

This secret procedure, joined with the constant 
brutal pressure brought to bear on all the partners of 
the diplomatic game—this is what gives Germany her 
appearance of a nocturnal prowler, lying in ambush in 
likely places so as to demand their money or their life! 
We know what discussion means when Germany is on 
her feet behind some bad customer, backing him up 
“with all her strength.” The most mysterious bureau 
of all the Prussian military officialdom, the general 
staff, is in intimate contact, through the military cab- 
inet of the Kaiser, with the chancellor’s office. It pre- 
pared the sudden attack on all the fronts. It had the 
prodigious conviction, according to the words of 


[64] 


597 


General von Schlieffen, “of alone holding the secret of 
victory.” It designated the victims. It had but one 
thought: to exploit to the full every favorable occa- 
sion; to fall on the adversary the moment he was 
feeble or going through a crisis; to consider it evident 
that this hour of feebleness when, logically, Germany 
should have felt herself less menaced, was accorded by 
Providence for Germany to strike. For less advan- 
tages during certain periods of waiting, this diplomacy 
bristling with bayonets contented itself with extortion 
and threats. But the season was foreseen in which 
the big harvests would be ripe. Then it must go 
farther; it must have war in order to gather in the 
harvest; a strictly “preventive” war. “Europe is too 
small to be divided,” said William II. to one of our 
military attachés. We now know the meaning of these 
words. This Europe, so slow to become unified, 
William II. intended to organize by the processes of 
German militarism, diplomacy, and bureaucracy. 
When a little nation, Serbia, in a contest in which she 
had the law on her side, attempted a timid pacific pro- 
test, the catastrophe was deliberately let loose. 

It was let loose with a premeditation the more evi- 
dent in that the nations of the world had begun to 
follow other methods than the German. The conflict 
between Germany and the world began in 1899 at the 
first Hague Conference. There the spirit—I may say 
the retrograde unintelligence—of German bureau- 
cracy was seen close at hand. It was a simple matter 
for states that disapproved of the conference not to 
send delegates. Germany did better; she sent a del- 
egate who afterwards scouted the conference of which 
he had been an associate. In the little book within 
which he summed up the work of the first meetings of 


[65] 


598 


a delegation charged with the building up of the future 
Society of Nations,® he speaks of the “Utopia of per- 
petual peace,” and shows how little Germany is dis- 
posed to regard war as a scourge, because it is to the 
war of 1870 that she owes her “unexpected economic 
flight,” (einen ungeahnten wirtschaftlichen Aufschwung). 
He talks of the importance of war “from the point of 
view of universal history and civilization,” and it is 
easy to see that war, which has procured for Germany 
and for her military civilization the place she holds in 
the world, should not be considered a phenomenon to 
be condemned. In conclusion he declares himself hos- 
tile to every attempt to pave the way for the Society 
of Nations by means of arbitration. To show the 
blindness of this German negotiator, it is only neces- 
sary to recall that almost immediately sixty-four 
arbitration treaties were concluded between nations 
all over the world, based on the agreements made at 
The Hague; that is to say, reserving all questions 
which touch the vital interests, honor, and indepen- 
dence of nations. 

The second Hague Conference (1907) wanted arbi- 
tration between the represented nations—heretofore 
left to their good pleasure—to be rendered obligatory, 
still reserving such questions as related to the inde- 
pendence, honor, and vital interests. The German 
group—Austria, the Balkan States (Serbia alone ex- 
cepted)—voted unanimously against this obligation. 
In vain the Baron de Marshall was refuted in all the 
judicial arguments he produced during the sittings. 
Italy, still in the Triple Alliance, who during these 
negotiations had signed two obligatory treaties with 

8 von Stengel, Welistaat und Friedensproblem. 1899. Preface, p. 
Vill, Vill, X1. 


[ 66 ] 


599 


Argentina and Mexico, abstained from voting in order 
not to vote against her allies. Russia would have 
signed immediatelyif the conference had been unani- 
mous. Germany having prevented unanimity, Russia 
could not sign. The conference ended in total con- 
fusion because of the unshakable refusal of the German 
negotiators. “Prodigious German diplomatic suc- 
cess!” cried the German papers for several weeks. 
Those who were able to talk with the witnesses of this 
second Hague Conference, know, however, that the 
indignation against Germany’s brutal intransigence 
was general. But such is German intellectual obtuse- 
ness concerning everything which touches interna- 
tional problems that, in the most humble sketch of 
international peace, the most legitimate tentative on 
the part of the little nations to procure certain guar- 
anties of law for their independence, Germany would 
see nothing but anti-German intrigue which she must 
break up by all means. 

Nevertheless, it can truthfully be said that the 
powers of the whole world, working together in this 
conference for four months at a task which stranded, 
were still able to get from their collaboration a very 
high idea of the common good of humanity. This idea 
was held in check by Germany and her vassals. But 
it was consolidated by the very discernment of the 
difficulties. The boundaries against which the effort 
to organize the world were breaking were more clearly 
seen. A great variety of universal Unions have ex- 
isted for a long time: the Latin monetary Union, the 
postal Union, the Red Cross, etc., etc. Is it for- 
bidden that we should hope some day to federate the 
administrations? The international technical con- 
ferences—for the establishment of a chart of the globe, 


[67] 


600 


for the unification of measures, etc., etc.—of which the 
number is increasing, could they not be unified and 
rendered permanent? And how would such a per- 
manent discussion of questions unceasingly multiply- 
ing and enlarging differ from a world-parliament? 

It is easy to see the hidden motive of Germany 
before the war. A world-parliament would be sooner 
or later (at least, so she believed) a Federation of 
States of the whole world. In this federated world- 
state, how long would Germany preserve her hege- 
mony? For here there would no longer be any ques- 
tion of methods of occult diplomacy supported by 
threats of force; everything would have to be dis- 
cussed openly and legally. It was easy for her to mask 
the fear of seeing her oppressive power lessened behind 
this specious objection: that a nation sure of itself 
and of its destiny could not let itself be tied down in 
a world-parliament by a majority of jealous and less 
gifted nations. German arrogance found itself again 
in this doctrine which treated all the other nations as 
inferiors just as the Prussian junkers treat as inferiors 
all the less conspicuous classes of the nation. German 
diplomacy refused every step toward world-parliamen- 
tarism, as'it had refused parliamentarism to the Ger- 
man people. 

It is true that in the administrative, judicial, and 
political organization of the Internation, precautions 
must be taken just as in the political, judicial, and 
administrative organization of the nation. There are 
immaterial interests in the life of men which it is use- 
less to try to “organize.” The deep beliefs in the life of 
the family, in the religious life and the conscience 
evade organization. They leap up desperately at any 
attempt to do them violence. In such matters we 

[68] 


601 


have not to organize but to respect. We have had 
religious peace ever since the state ceased to place its 
means of constraint at the service of the warring 
religious bodies. Perhaps we shall have peace be- 
tween nations on the day when all the powers per- 
ceive that patriotism is one of those things which in 
the humblest citizen of the weakest nation must be 
respected and not “organized.” 

The very idea of the sovereignty of a people, the 
principle of nationality, in so far as it rests on the 
clear consciousness and the meditated will of the 
people, is in itself a protestation against the idea of a 
universal secular monarchy and a universal spiritual 
sovereignty. It erects itself simultaneously against 
the Holy Empire and against the Papacy. There is 
evidence, therefore, that this right of peoples to dis- 
pose of themselves, claimed by them in opposition to 
the most formidable powers of the ancien régime, is 
preéminently a matter of conscience. The future 
world will not be able to conceive of itself except as a 
free collaboration of peoples. This collaboration 
would, therefore, never violate one of the most pro- 
found sentiments of the conscience—national senti- 
ment. It could only be concerned for national inter- 
ests. And so, our hope, based on the Society of 
Nations, is that conflicting national interests may 
always be regulated amicably and never again give 
rise to wars. 

Is German opinion ready for such a transformation? 
Certain enlightened Germans are incontestably ready. 
It is too early to name them. They will recognize 
themselves in the outline which I have drawn here. 
It is for the German people to give progressively to 
these men the influence to which they have the right 


[ 69 ] 


602 


and which would facilitate the understanding between 
Germany and the most clairvoyant part of liberal 
humanity. But it is German feeling, profound and 
unanimous, which is in question. If that is not ready, 
the Society of Nations cannot accept Germany and 
her vassals tomorrow. It will be sufficient to read one 
of the most powerful journals of the majority socialists, 
the Hamburger Echo, in order to see how they make 
game (November 19, 1916) of the motions of the Ligue 
des Droits de l’Homme (League of the Rights of Man) 
and of French socialism which, through various articles 
of Pierre Renaudel, approved these motions. The 
German socialist paper goes so far as to deny “all sane 
appreciation and all real willingness to make peace” 
on the part of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme and the 
French socialists. Victor Adler, the well-known 
Austrian socialist, declared at the imperial conference 
of the Austrian social-democrats on November 4, 1916: 
“A reorganization of Europe, where all could live as 
equals among equals, could have been had by the 
powers of the Entente with less cost.” But he forgets 
that his entire party, ever since before Copenhagen, 
bears along with all the other political parties of his 
country, a share of responsibility for the oppression of 
the little nations of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, 
and that he did nothing of any use to keep Serbia from 
being assaulted by the most insolent of ultimatums 
and the most illegitimate war of aggression. Victor 
Adler has only the right to be silent, since he did not 
recognize the right of ali the nationalities oppressed by 
Austria-Hungary—and primarily of Serbia—to live as 
equals beside the Germans and the Hungarians. 

The good German or Austrian citizen who does his 
duty conscientiously every day and goes every evening 


[70] 


603 


to the beer-room to keep up his confidence in the public 
authorities by loyalist conversation, will never be 
shaken from his apathy as long as he is led by such 
popular leaders and such journalists. It is true 
that Bethmann-Hollweg himself said on November 8, 
1916: “A cry will go around the world, calling for 
pacific agreements. Germany will be ready to enter a 
league of nations. She will even be ready to place 
herself at the head of such a League of Nations to hold 
the trouble-makers in check.” Why, then, did she 
send delegates to the Hague who officially defeated 
and afterwards scouted that which was but the every- 
day effort of Europe and the world for durable peace? 

But indeed a cry has gone up, a cry announcing that 
the Society of Nations is within sight. And this cry 
will reach even Germany. And there it will become a 
vehement protest against the conduct of the German 
leaders. The German thinkers have little courage, 
they are blinded still by many sophisms. Already, 
however, they are denouncing the desperate situation 
into which the conduct of the leaders has driven their 
people. An eminent jurist, in a book on the future 
Germany, can exclaim: “The German nation will 
never understand why its strong and brilliant Empire, 
in spite of the prodigious power which it hasjust shown 
in this war and which it shows in the economic and 
military fields and also in the field of civilization, has 
not been able to establish a system of alliances of a 
nature to prevent universal catastrophe. It will never 
understand why, predestined, in concert with the 
oldest civilized peoples, to found a new and greater 
Europe, we should have entered into conflict with 
those same peoples and should now be forced to turn 
anew toward the Orient. Alas for us if Germany last- 


Ur] 


604. 


ingly turns her face only to the Orient, ceasing to look 
westward.” 9 What Germany needs, says Stier-Somlo, 
“is a foreign policy rooted in the conscience of all the 
citizens and approved by them.” But this conscience 
of all the Germans is at present gorged with the most 
aggressive presumption. The Germans are accom- 
plices of their governmental foreign policy precisely 
in so far as they refuse to control it. Their passivity 
gave ita blank check. They are tranquil because they 
think they are going to win. Today they are still 
lacking in the elementary courage that consists in 
establishing responsibility, because they believe cyni- 
cally that their victory will pass its bloody sponge 
over their responsibility. The legal method attempted 
at The Hague was not as yet a redressing of ancient 
wiongs. It was only a first frail pledge, a first mani- 
festation of a willingness not to start such iniquities 
over again in the future. In refusing to try this 
method, which would not repair the abuses of the 
Prussian policies of 1866 or of 1870 but which could 
prevent their recurrence, they at once revealed their 
profound intention and broke with western and Ameri- 
can ideas. 


Ill. THE CORRUPTION OF GERMAN SCIENCE 


All the faults of nations, like those of men, can be set 
right on condition that their innermost opinions are 
not corrupted. German public opinion has not been 
kept in its integrity. I want no better proof of this 
today than the weakness of German legal science. It 
has raised imposing monuments of historic erudition, 
but it has forgotten that there is something besides 
merely finding out whence came the existing law. The 


9 Stier-Somlo, Grund- und Zukunftsfragen deutscher Politik. 1917, 
p. 295. 
[72] 


605 


important vocation of the science of law is not only to 
establish the theory of positive rights, but the theory 
of justice. Quite upside down, the German savants 
infer that which should be from that which is. There 
are still to be found in high places those who resemble 
that Justus Moeser who defended slavery against 
J. J. Rousseau. 

Through the fault of some jurists, Bismarck did not 
find materials prepared for the building of the German 
Empire. All Germany tended with profound aspira- 
tion toward unity. But when unity was possible, no 
one knew how to give it a body. This alone marks a 
failure of German science. The work of the Parlia- 
ment of Frankfort prepared the Empire out of an 
indefinite number of confused ideas. No one knew 
how to give them a legal form. Is it surprising that in 
creating the constitution of the Empire, Bismarck 
could only copy the constitution of Prussia, with the 
addition of a little universal suffrage to modernize it? 

For the German jurists are also true Germans of 
the emasculated bourgeoisie of the fourteenth century. 
They believe that politics are carried on from “higher 
up”; they live in a kneeling posture. Specialized in 
the interpretation of laws already made, they imagine 
that the purpose of this study is to justify this law. 
They forget the laws that must be made, the medita- 
tion de lege ferenda. They have never come upon the 
words of Ibsen: “Science must be the ally of the ideas 
of the future; then let it have all its veils wide to the 
wind that comes from the open.” They are the sad 
Epigoni of a Prussian past which they prolong and 
glorify instead of wishing to see reborn. 

I do not know of one fundamental legal idea that 
they have not corrupted, beginning with the idea of 


173] 


606 


the state, the idea of authority, and that of the rela- 
tions between nations. 

1. In the grave conflict which, ever since the world 
was the world, has set right and force against each 
other, German legal science takes the side of force. 
To be sure it does not glorify brute force. But for it 
a right (law, drozt) is an instrument of intelligent force. 
“Right,” said one of the most illustrious modern Ger- 
man jurists, Rudolf von Jhering, “arises from the 
power of the strongest,” to which is opposed another 
force “which arises from the coalition of equals.” }° Here 
we have, in a way, the primitive monarchy, the 
Strong, and the primitive republic, the Weak, in co- 
alition. They are opposed to each other. Jhering 
grants that they cannot destroy each other. Force 
feels the necessity of limitation. This limitation, 
which it accepts through prudence, constitutes right 
(droit). Beyond this is the region in which perhaps 
Force would no longer be the strongest. Rvght is, 
therefore, Force directed (dirigée, directa), following 
the rules of intelligence. But who does not see that 
though it is disciplined force, it still remains basically 
force? There is no distinguishing the two, unless by 
abstraction. In this conception it would be false to 
say that right directs. At least it does not direct as 
the compass directs the helmsman. Force alone, says 
Jhering, is seated at the rudder, to decide and to act. 
Right is only a collection of experimental rules which 
must be followed in order to employ Force judiciously. 
Right 1s the politics of force and can only realize itself 
through Force. This being the case, so long as the 


10 Jhering, Zweck im Recht, II, 250. A substantial and lucid sum- 
ming up of German doctrines will be found in Michel Aguilera, 
L'idée du droit en Allemagne depuis Kant jusqu’ad nos jours. 1892. 
It would be well to add the history of the last quarter of a century. 


174] 


607 


weak are not in league, or so long as their coalition is 
not a counterpoise for the tyranny of the strong, there 
would be no right (droit); nor could there be any 
Right, if Force were sufficiently astute to discover 
methods of action which would make unnecessary its 
own limitation. There we have the implied postulate 
to which German legal science leads in proportion as 
it deals with more complex objects. 

2. What, then, is the function of the state? Ac- 
cording to occidental thought it consists in maintain- 
ing and developing the rights of citizens (or the law, 
drow). For the Germans, this vital function is reduced 
to “the handling of the social force of constraint” (die 
Handhabung der sozialen Zwangsgewalt). The state is 
only the highest organization of this force. Every 
other force must bend before it. Long before Treit- 
schke, Jhering wrote: “There is only one mortal sin 
from which the state cannot be absolved: the sin of 
weakness.” 

A serious conclusion when there are small states 
necessarily weaker than the big ones, and when, very 
evidently, the big states whose function it is to grow 
strong and for whom, according to this doctrine, it 
would be a crime not to grow stronger, could augment 
their strength by appropriating the little ones. To 
this doctrine we can only oppose another: that the 
state is a moral entity. No German jurist would 
admit this and even the most liberal refuse to grant 
the great ideal principle: In the beginning was the law 
(right, droit). According to Otto Mayer, one of the 
most highly considered authorities of public contem- 
porary law: “The origin and the enduring basis of the 
state is force.” The state, according to him, has al- 
ways been an accomplished fact, to which were added, 


[75] 


608 


adventitiously, custom and law. A supreme power 
established on a given territory for the people who 
occupy that territory—this is what constitutes a 
state. What object is proposed by the men who 
establish this power on their territory? It is of no 
importance. History will tell and will be the judge of 
their plans. In itself “the state is an enormous bulky 
fact, dissimilar from the law, which is superadded and 
which never entirely penetrates it.”" By this de- 
scription we can already recognize the state that does 
not consider itself bound by any treaty when it thinks 
that its power is in question. 

3. When we speak to men or to nations, demanding 
their obedience, we must define the authority in whose 
name we make our demand. Divers religious bodies 
and German romanticism as well have imagined mys- 
tical or sentimental justifications for this authority, 
of which in reality none has found expression in Ger- 
. man law. The truth is that German public law 
maintains the doctrines of absolutism of the ancien 
régime just as the Roman law introduced by the 
Renaissance and the abstract natural law of the 
eighteenth century founded it. There are in Europe 
no doctrines that have created a worse princely omni- 
potence. In this form of organization the relation of 
the prince to the official has always been the mechani- 
cal relation of the motor to the thing moved. The law 
was never anything but the transmission-band. There 
Was never any regulating fly-wheel nor any counter- 
poise, such as parliament has been in England and 
even in France. Since the Renaissance there has 
never been a commune that could resist the arbitrary 

11 Otto Mayer, Die juristische Person und thre Verwendbarkett im 
Offentlichen Recht. (Festgabe fiir Laband, t. 1.) 

[76] 


609 


power of princes. It was necessary in the nineteenth 
century to reconstruct the communes from top to 
bottom and to protect them against the arbitrary 
power of the presidents of provinces.” The old abso- 
lutism always defied organized bodies:  Heterie 
statut monarchie perquam inimice, said the old adage 
of the legists of the ancien régime; and among these 
corporations there were none that appeared more 
dangerous than the cities. It is from this tradition 
that both the doctrine of the German jurists and the 
German administrative practice are built up. “The 
power of the will of the state, the force of the state, 
this is what makes the law of the state,” said Gerber; 
and public law, according to German jurists, is thus 
“the theory of the power of the state.” This power is 
personified in the monarch, and all that is under the 
control of the authority of the state can be willed and 
executed by the sovereign. 

Under this head, the accord between a pure im- 
perialist, such as Laband, and the theorists reputed as 
liberal, like Jellinek, is perfect. The state alone, they 
say, has sovereignty over men. It has, according to 
Laband, “the right to command free persons with 
compulsion. This is its specific privilege which it 
shares with no other entity.” 4 Jellinek says, “The 
power of legal restraint, as an emanation of sovereign 
power, belongs only to the state.” © As for us, we are 

2 Doubtless beneath the dust of the old absolute law a Gierke 
could have rediscovered the trace of the corporative German law. 
For a long time he has been the only one. The historic development 
of the authority of the state in Prussia and in Germany is of other 
origin. 

13 Gerber, Grundziige des deutschen Staatsrechis, p. 3. 

MQLaband, Deutsches Staatsrecht, I. 67 et passim. 

15 Jellinek, Allgemeine Staatslehre, 3rd ed., 1914, I, p. 176. 


[77] 


610 


‘ accustomed to think that there are other bodies also 
possessed of the right of constraint—communities, for 
example; and that the state is only a greater corpora- 
tion, invested with more extensive powers. The com- 
mon source of these powers of the community and the 
state is, in all occidental law, the mandate of the 
citizens. In German law, on the contrary, communal 
authority is a delegation of the state and the state is 
a primary fact, uncontrollable and undisputed. The 
whole legal science of the Germans canonizes an intan- 
gible power of the state, eternal and sacred, incarnate 
in the sovereign, who possesses it. as a divine right. 
It is true that these theorists say prudently, with 
Laband, that this is “a power judicially recognized;” 
and that subjects owe obedience only “through the 
channels of the law” (von Rechtswegen). But is it 
not the sovereign who, according to the German 
jurists, determines the law? Then in what way is this 
sovereign authority, above which there is none other 
and which holds its warrant only from the sovereign’s 
will and good pleasure, bound by a law and a norm 
which render it legitimate? In the German doctrine 
it is impossible to determine one right of communities 
and associations, or one right of man and citizen. 

4. This is why the idea of the relations between 
nations is corrupted in its turn. “Every viable state,” 
says von Jhering, “has the instinct to spread out geo- 
graphically. It has this instinct in proportion to the 
living vigor with which the social idea has taken root.” 
The big collectivity devours the smaller. When all the 
little nations have been devoured, there will be a 
struggle to the death among the big ones until they 
are melted into a more monstrous agglomeration. A 

16R. von Jhering, Zweck im Recht, II, p. 303. 

[78 ] 


611 


hard law, but, says Jhering, it is the law of history; 
history does not tolerate the small. We can pity the 
generations which are chosen to suffer the fate of being 
crushed. History takes care that the pain and misery 
of the sacrificed generations is compensated for by the 
happiness of the generations that follow.17 “The 
instinct which pushes states to expansion and con- 
quest is the protest of society against the restrictions 
which the social conquest has imposed upon it.” A 
prodigious deduction, if we reflect upon it. The 
peoples consent to a harsh social discipline and thereby 
become conquering peoples. The fruitful future out- 
side will unbridle the passions restrained within and 
pay for their servitude. 

We can understand why such a science, which 
accepts an international organization to combat the 
plague and cholera, would never care to accept one 
against war. Believers and non-believers agree in 
repudiating such an organization. For the positiv- 
ists of German science, war is normal and natural. 
For the believers in German religion, war is divine. 
The Christian Middle Ages clung to the evangelic 
words which announced “Peace on earth.” It was 
reserved for German Christianism and German science 
to maintain that peace is not a true ideal of civilization 
because it contradicts the divine order in which war 
takes its place as a law of nature.}® 

I should have liked to find a corrective for these’ 
doctrines in the doctrines of contemporary German 
socialism. Is it my fault if I cannot find any? The 
great founders of the German socialist party, they, too, 

W Ibid., Il, p. 309. 

18 yon Lueder, Handbuch des Volkerrechis,1V. Holtzendorff (1888) : 


“Tf war is divine, because it is a universal law, it is also in accord with 
the ideal of civilization itself; therefore it is salutary and good.” 


179] 


612 


submitted to the fascination of the Bismarckian 
régime. They fought with borrowed arms. To speak 
the truth, they are spirits of the same structure as 
Bismarck. Lassalle asserted sardonically that “guns, 
too, are a piece of the constitution.” For he defined 
the constitution as a simple equilibrium of present 
forces. In this manner, the law could belong to it 
only as a written formula by which this equilibrium is 
interpreted. Now, between force and law (or right, 
droit) the difference is not the fact of the notation 
which formulates it. Law and force are two realities, 
intranslatable the one into the other, irreducible, of 
which the relation must be discovered. And if German 
socialism were a doctrine of justice, Marx would not 
have been able to write cynically: “Bismarck is doing 
our work.” For the work of Bismarck never consisted 
in establishing law. 

As to the German socialism of recent years, its 
principal and proclaimed preoccupation has been not 
to resume against the state the polemics reputed as 
bourgeois of the old liberal parties. This state, said 
the socialists, is going toward imperialism; and, for 
the benefit of the higher bourgeoiste, it is going toward 
war. But the progressive unification of the trusts, 
the concentration of the means of production and ex- 
change, in short, the vigorous centralization of the 
political and administrative powers, will facilitate the 
socialization of all the resources and all the forces. 
The proletarian conquest of the state will thus be 
hastened by the evolution of the present economic and 
political régime. Good apostles, who, on the day when 
the cataclysm of war that they did not know how 
to stop and perhaps did not want to stop was let 
loose, discover that in each country the working-class 

[80] 


613 


is conjointly liable for the capitalism of the country 
and consequently for its imperialism; so that the 
working-class, even in a war of aggression, is urged by 
its leaders to fight at the side of those who are respon- 
sible for the crime. Certainly this is not a doctrine 
that can ever lay claim to justice! 

Bourgeots or socialist, these doctrines commit the 
same sophism: they define law by that which is its 
limitation, by the forces which encumber it, by the 
old social forces, today somewhat attenuated in their 
brutality, but unchanged in their nature. For indeed, 
it is impossible ever to make right (law, droit) issue 
from might; for right is of another order. 

The birth of law and justice in human relations is 
one of the most profound acts elaborated in the con- 
sciences of men and nations. Law, like morality, is 
born of that profound sentiment within, which pro- 
pounds the identity of self and of others. “Insane, who 
believes that I am not thou!” cried Victor Hugo. And 
so there is but one source of law and authority, and 
that is the affirmation of an equal liberty by all those 
who feel themselves thus allied and identical. Col- 
lectivities alone have authority over the individual, 
because they are destined to create enlarged liberties 
and greater equality; if some day they may do this 
fraternally, they are peremptory today, because ele- 
mentary rights must be assured. But, for this belief, 
which is the democratic belief and which will one day 
be the belief of all men, no authority is delegated 
from above, nor belongs to any superior caste or any 
sovereign. The divine law resides only in the human 
conscience of all and of each. Social authority is a 
delegation of individual consciences. We band to- 
gether with those who resemble us and whom we 

[81] 


614 


recognize as our equals in liberty and in law, by a 
consent which is first emotional, afterwards rational. 
The authority of the state is not different in its nature 
from that of any other collectivity to which we.belong. 

Every one of these communities has its ideal or 
feeling aspect as well as its legal aspect. Our families 
and our towns are dear to our hearts. And they have 
also always had, for purposes of litigation, their arma- 
ture of positive law. The country that we love in its 
legal aspect is called the state, to which, for purposes 
of litigation, we have delegated our powers of con- 
straint over ourselves and over our fellow-citizens. It 
is contrary to our consciences and to our consciousness 
of our rights, for us to imagine a state in which the 
authority does not convey the mandate of our liberty. 
We cannot, therefore, obey a state which oppresses 
our consciences and our families, because that would 
no longer be a country. In the same way, if we ask 
for nothing better than some day to submit our law- 
suits to a Society of Nations, it is on the condition that 
this Society, descended from the sphere of the ideal 
into the sphere of reality, should first recognize the 
entire equality of rights and the complete liberty of 
all countries. 

Concerning law, authority, the state, and the rela- 
tions between states, we thus uphold rational affirma- 
tions which are opposed to the German doctrine of the 
nineteenth century. Compulsion does not make 
right, it comes only to sanction it. It is a guaranty 
against the aggressions of barbarism and egotism. In 
the civil and penal order, measures of coercion are 
only a legitimate defense, a reaction of distress. That 
is why they always come too late. They would re- 
establish the mutilated right if they could, or at least 

[ 82 ] 


615 


they fortify the respect for the right. They can neither 
preserve this right, in so far as it has not been injured, 
nor establish it in itself. Let us ponder this example of 
private law, in order better to understand public 
international law. 

In every nation the relations between individuals 
are regulated by contracts, by pacts (pacta, from 
paciscor), which are dominated by a system recognized 
by all, a universal and durable agreement, which is 
social peace (pax, also from paciscor). In the same 
way, relations exist between nations, which are al- 
ready protected by rules recognized in free treaties. 
These relations already contain the promise of an 
international generalized agreement. Some day these 
various pacts will bring about between the nations a 
great universal and durable pact which is peace. This 
peace alone is the right, the law; and in this sense, 
humanity has a right to a total, universal and eternal 
peace. | 

This right cannot be created by force. Force can 
only come toitsaid. It cannot even create the rights 
which are at the bottom of the free transactions be- 
tween nations. But these rights must be defended! 
This reaction of distress is defensive warfare. It also 
always comes too late! And it is not itself party to 
the right because a right is of another order than force. 
Nevertheless, in the absence of a repressive organiza- 
tion which would put its force at the service of the 
Society of Nations, a defensive war is the sole method 
which keeps the law from disappearing from among 
men. In any case, a war of aggression, that is to say, 
a war of conquest, or even a preventive war, is above 
all an inexpiable violation of the law (right, droit), 
first, because it denies the very object of the law; 


[83] 


616 


second, because it misconceives the help that law can 
receive from force. These two kinds of war ought to 
disappear forever from the political methods permitted 
between civilized peoples. 


IV. NECESSITIES AND HOPES 


If such is our belief on the subject of law, the state, 
authority, and our relations with other countries, what 
do we think about the kind of peace that we can make 
with Germany? The German people has its right to 
peace like all other peoples. What is admirable in 
the war that we are waging is that it cannot leave 
room for hatred, being a war for right.19 But, under- 
stand me well, the German people must first let the 
law be restored, the law which, through the fault of 
their governors and through their own complicity, has 
suffered the most brutal and the most extensive viola- 
tion known to history. Against this eruption of force 
the defensive reaction which went out to check it was 
prompt.and is still growing in strength. To it falls 
the duty of repairing other outrages committed pre- 
viously by the same German people and since unpun- 
ished. The German nation with which we shall have 
to treat will not be territorially the same that spread 
its successive tides of rapine over the map of Europe. 


19 T have since found the same thought more eloquently expressed 
in a speech delivered by Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler, President of 
Columbia University, at the Commercial Club of Cincinnati, on the 
21st of April, 1917: “Never chant a hymn of hate against those who, 
for the time being, are worshiping a false god. A hymn of hate is 
just as displeasing in English as it is in German. We are concerned 
here in a conflict too solemn and too frightful to leave place for 
hatred; for if the issue is such as we wish it to be, we shall lift yet 
another nation up to the sublime plane of our own principles—a 
nation that is today powerfully armed against us.” Looking Forward, 
IQI7. 


184] 


617 


These people must understand that the politics of 
conquest carried on by their leaders for a hundred 
years—and more—and taught by every manner of 
educational, scientific, and religious propaganda, is 
composed of a series of evil affairs, just as it is a series 
of unlucky strokes. The peace that we shall make 
must not bea patched up peace. The present difficulty 
is not so much how to conclude a sort of half peace, 
which for a long time to come would sanction the old 
injustices and which would always be an encourage- 
ment to begin the same criminal enterprises all over 
again; the difficulty is to make a peace which will pre- 
vent Europe from being German in 1950. 

And this is why the crafty beginnings of this enter- 
prise, so long unrecognized, must be destroyed. The 
peace must be, in the first place, a peace of restitutions: 
Alsace and Lorraine returned to France, with the 
frontiers of 1789—that is understood; Schleswig re- 
turned to Denmark, and perhaps a neutral guaranty 
established between Denmark and Germany so that 
the Danes will not again easily be the object of a 
sudden attack—that is understood; Poland restored 
in its entirety and given access to the sea—that is 
understood; and all the irredentist countries, Italian, 
Rumanian, Czecho-Slovak, and Slovene—and Hel- 
lenic—for which since 1915 no statute of liberty could 
be established—these should be unconditionally set 
free. We can only mention cursorily these matters 
upon which the allies are in accord. We can permit 
ourselves to believe that we have the strength to ob- 
tain these restitutions and along with them material 
reparation for the injuries that have accompanied the 
German aggression and occupation since 1914. The 
manner of action which will bring about this repara- 


[85] 


618 


tion is the business of the responsible statesmen and 
military chiefs. 

For us, it is important to know what must be 
changed within Germany, so that her people will no 
longer be in a mood to let themselves be led by the 
chiefs who started the war. If the bourgeoisie and the 
bureaucracy and the science of Germany are cor- 
rupted by the Prussian system, first of all this system 
must be broken up. The bourgeoisie that has been 
humbled or seduced must be reinstated and the Ger- 
man mind, so forgetful of its occidental tradition, 
must be regenerated. 

The keystone of the Prussian system imposed on 
Germany is the Prussian monarchy. Then, first of all, 
this monarchy must be abolished. In 1848, Frederick 
William IV. could not be dethroned. A clique of 
junkers led by “Prince Shellfire” (afterwards known as 
William I.) and by certain occult chiefs, of one of 
whom, Bismarck, the king himself said that he had an 
“odor of blood,” again seized the power. Germany 
owes it to us to take up her interrupted revolution of 
1848 and to put it through. 

And here we shall run against scruples among the 
Allies. We shall hear it said that this is to accept 
once more the principle of the Holy Alliance; and 
that it is an interference, doomed to failure, into the 
internal affairs of another people; and that it would 
stir up a revolt of this people as it stirred up a revolt 
in France after 1815. Thisscruple is a scruple of peace 
and not a scruple of war. The Germans do not feel 
in the least embarrassed about intervening at this 
moment in the internal affairs of six French départe- 
ments, of several Russian provinces, of all of Belgium, 
all Serbia, all Rumanian Valachia. They would in- 

[86] 


619 


tervene permanently in the internal affairs of any of 
these countries that they were able to keep. We do 
not plan to do anything of this sort. But democracies 
must not be deprived of a means of action which 
monarchies know how to use. 

Every new system that takes over the power in any 
nation demands, first of all, to be recognized by other 
governments. This recognition is not in the least a 
formality. It is a serious act of international law. A 
government which is not recognized by the civilized 
nations is virtually in a state of war with them until 
it succeeds in inspiring their confidence. There have 
been cases where the refusal of confidence has gone 
so far as a summons to abdicate. The governments of 
Europe refused for a long time to recognize our first 
Republic, then Louis Philippe, the Second Republic 
and Napoleon III. They formally required the abdi- 
cation of Napoleon I., without which, to speak the 
truth, Europe could not re-establish order. It is not 
forbidden to liberal nations in coalition to demand of 
Germany, or to impose on her, certain pledges of peace, 
just as the reactionary coalition of 1815 demanded 
them of France—suspected as she was of a revolu- 
tionary spirit even under Napoleon! For the Napo- 
leonic liberalism was belligerent! This is why the 
peoples of Europe were within their rights in demand- 
ing the disappearance of the Napoleonic dynasty. 
The western coalition of today has even more reason 
to demand the disappearance of the Hohenzollern 
dynasty. 

However, as Germany, in public law, is not a mon- 
archy but a corporation of associated monarchic states, 
over which Prussia merely exercises a presidency, the 
whole corporation of monarchs must be broken. up. 


[87] 


620 


They are, indeed, only a pack of hounds held in leash 
by the great chief huntsman. We must make it 
understood that there can no longer be a military, 
corporative monarchy in Europe, one in will, secret, 
terrible, possessing the industrial and military means 
of hurling across all its frontiers an army virtually 
concentrated in advance, mobilized in eight days and 
ready to trample under foot whoever dares oppose 
one of its wishes or the will of the multitudes in whom 
it knows how to fanaticize the greed. Europe and the 
world refuse henceforth to recognize this modernized 
form of absolutism. They will not treat with it. 
This is not to say that the Allies will impose a con- 
stitution on Germany. The German people will them- 
selves choose their form of government, to the exclu- 
sion of the one that has tyrannized over the world. 
They will have the amount of liberty of which they 
are worthy. For liberty cannot be imposed; each 
‘man and each nation must make his own. But the 
Allies will treat only with a free people; and it is intol- 
erable for the world that this corporation of dynasties 
and the kind of government to which the present war 
is imputable should continue to exist. The Allies 
cannot lay down their arms until the day on which 
the German people shall have broken this form of 
government and dismissed these corporated monarchs. 
If the German people, in a spirit of obstinate pride 
which would once more make them the accomplices 
of their government, should refuse to sacrifice their 
monarchs and their sham “constitution’—that is to 
say, the system of military bureaucracy which is per- 
petuating the ancien régime in the height of the twen- 
tieth century—we need not believe that there is no 
punishment for them. Such punishment would exist, 
[88 ] 


621 


even though the Allies, through weariness or impover- 
ishment, were to dream of stopping the bloodshed. 
War, according to Clausewitz, is “politics continued 
by other means.” Inversely, politics may also have 
the right to continue the work of war against a preying 
nation, even into the time of peace. This would cer- 
tainly be necessary if we did not achieve a total and 
profound peace, guaranteed by a recasting of the in- 
stitutions of the German people and by a regeneration 
of their spirit. 

We are not of those who extol this continuation of 
war in time of peace. We want first a complete vic- 
tory and then total peace. But Germany must know 
that this continuation of war into peace is possible if 
she refuses to give the reparations and pledges which 
the law demands. There are economic methods of 
breaking the arrogance of the German agrarians. 
There are economic methods of breaking even the new 
prosperity of the German peasants. There is a way 
of checking forever the forward impulse of German 
industry and of curbing the great industrial capital- 
ism, in coalition with the junkers and, at the same 
time, the German working-people who have demanded 
their share in the casting of the net attempted by big 
industry. 

There are certain forms of the industrial and agri- 
cultural boycott, under which the German people, 
surrounded by a hostility equivalent to the worst kind 
of blockade, would no longer be able to continue the 
proud prosperity of its life before the war. The rich 
classes would be ruined; the people could no longer 
bring up their superfluity of children, formerly so 
- easily absorbed by a flourishing industry; the peas- 
ants and laborers of the decimated population would 


[89] 


622 


be reduced to emigration. But they would go, these 
German emigrants, to countries forewarned, countries 
that would no longer permit any organized espionage 
nor any sly infiltration into their affairs, nor any mas- 
querade of false naturalization under the Delbriick 
law. Then perhaps, enlightened at last by the dis- 
approval which would cause to weigh heavily on them 
the political system against which they had never 
known how to revolt and which they had tolerated in 
order to benefit by its military successes, they would 
again become the modest Germans of 1848. These 
also were emigrants. But this was the protestation of 
their liberalism; and in the countries that received 
them, they were in advance the friends of all the liberal 
causes. 

This punishment accomplished—for which we do 
not clamor but which might become necessary—it will 
be time, perhaps, to attempt a peaceful federation of 
the nations. This will admit no Central Europe— 
Mittel-Europa—which promised to be only a prodi- 
gious fortress with dissembled posterns for sorties and 
with saps pushed far in advance of all its bastioned 
fronts. This will be an organization of law, under- 
stood in such a way that the defensive reaction, 
should the law be violated, would be both immediate 
and enormous, because it would sum up all the means 
of action of all the countries united to establish it. 
This, however, is another subject, the most difficult of 
all, upon which light will come only little by little, by 
means of legal discussion and experimental gropings, 
demanding the greatest effort that it has ever been 
possible to make in the organization of human 
societies. 


[90} 


623 


To this organization of peace, what will the Ger- 
mans bring? Thus far they have never brought any- 
thing but obstacles. They have not known how to 
organize anything but war and an invasive industry 
to prolong or exploit or prepare for war. Perhaps, 
however, some day, under the crushing pressure of 
the facts, they will bring something better. Their 
critical spirit, applied to so many subjects, will per- 
haps some day be applied to political subjects aban- 
doned formerly to the mysterious decisions of the 
staff and the bureaucracy. Their humanitarianism 
of other days will reawaken. This regeneration is 
possible, but it can come only through their defeat. 

They will then find it profitable to re-read such 
theoreticians as Nietzsche, in whom is to be found at 
the same time the last child of the Hellenizing classi- 
cism of Goethe and the most rigorous of lay-moralists, 
formed in the school of the Nazarene. As Plato wept 
to see the Greeks spill Hellenic blood in floods during 
the constant wars of extermination from city to city, 
so Nietzsche, more eloquently than any other of his 
generation, wept at the idea of seeing Europeans 
spilling European blood.?? He could not endure in 
Germany “the spirit of littleness and servility which 
penetrates everything, down to the last little village, 
down to the least little village newspaper, and up to 
the most respected artists and savants.” 4 He could 
not accustom himself to the German idea of force. 
“The Germans imagine that force is necessarily mani- 
fested by hardness and cruelty. They submit, there- 
fore, willingly and with admiration... . . They 


20 Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, I, par. 442. 
21 Posthumous fragments of Mfenschliches, Allzumenschliches (Works 
XI, par. 539). 


[or] 


624. 


taste of terror with devotion. It is not easy for them 
to believe that there is force in gentleness and in 
silence.” ” 

He observed of the Germans that the psychological 
basis of every soul is the will to be strong. But to this 
psychologist who seeks to apply the results of trans- 
formism to the moral-world, “the will to be strong” is 
only the rude trunk out of which are developed the 
refined and ennobled instincts. This will does not 
exist in its primitive dimensions, he says, except in the 
avid slave, for whom the discipline of slavery is neces- 
sary, as is afterwards the slow rising up which trans- 
forms him. Real power, on the contrary, he says in 
Morgenréte, lies in gentle and courteous souls. The 
thoughts that direct the world come “on the feet of 
doves,” declares Zarathustra. For the importance lies 
in the values; and throughout the system of Nietzsche 
it is the values which in the last analysis give direction 
to the use of the powers. This is the Germany, 
attached once more to the immaterial values of civili-, 
zation, that we could receive into the Society of 
Nations. 

CHARLES ANDLER 

22 Tbid., par. 543. 


[92] 


LIST OF PUBLICATIONS 


Nos. 1-121 (April, 1907, to January, 1918). Including papers by Baron 
d’Estournelles de Constant, George Trumbull Ladd, Elihu Root, Barrett 
Wendell, Charles E. Jefferson, Seth Low, John Bassett Moore, William James, 
Andrew Carnegie, Pope Pius X, Heinrich Lammasch, Norman Angell, Charles 
W. Eliot, Sir Oliver Lodge, Lord Haldane, Alfred H. Fried, James Bryce, and 
others; also, a series of official documents dealing with the European War. 
A list of titles and authors will be sent on application. 


122. The Aims of the War: Letter of Lord Lansdowne to the London Daily 
Telegraph, November 29, 1917. Reply by Cosmos printed in the New 
York Times, December 1, 1917. The President’s Address to the Con- 
gress, December 4, 1917. January, 1918. 


I23. Victory or Defeat: No Half-way House, speech delivered by the Rt. Hon. 
David Lloyd George, December 14, 1917; British Labor’s War Aims, 
statement adopted at the Special National Labor Conference at Central 
Hall, Westminster, December 28, 1917; Great Britain’s War Aims, 
speech delivered by the Rt. Hon. David Lloyd George at the Trade 
Union Conference on Man Power, January 5, 1918; Labor’s After-War 
Economic Policy, by the Rt. Hon. Arthur Henderson, M.P.; America’s 
Terms of Settlement, address by President Wilson to the Congrcss, 
January 8, 1918. British Labor Party’s Address to the Russian People, 
January I5, 1918. February, 1918. 


124. The United States and Japan: text of the Root-Takahira Understanding 
of November 30, 1908, and of the Lansing-Ishii Agreement of Novem- 
ber 3, 1917; Japan and the United States, address by the Hon. Elihu 
Root, October 1, 1917; The Lansing-Ishii Agreement, address by the 
Hon. James L. Slayden, November 15, 1917; What of Our Fears of 
Japan? by Kenneth S. Latourette. March, 1918. 


I25. The Awakening of the German People, by Otfried Nippold. April, 1918. - 


126. The Anniversary of America’s Entry into the War: An address delivered 
by President Wilson at Baltimore, Maryland, April 6, 1918; an article 
written for The Daily Chronicle of London, by Professor Gilbert Murray. 
May, 1918. 


127. The Lichnowsky Memorandum: Introduction and translation by Munroe 
Smith, German text from the Berliner Borsen-Courier, Appendix by 
Munroe Smith and Henry F. Munro; Reply of Herr von Jagow. June, 
1918. 


128. America and the Russian Dilemma, by Jerome Landfield. The German 
Peace Treaties and Middle Europe. July, 1918. 


[93 ] 


129. 


130. 


We BE 


132. 


133. 


134. 


135. 


136. 


137: 


A Voice from Germany: Why German Peace Declarations Fail to Con- 
vince, by Professor F. W. Foerster. Austria’s Peace Proposals: The 
Letter to Prince Sixtus. August, 1918. 


Memoranda and Letters of Dr. Muehlon: Introduction and translation 
by Munroe Smith, German text and Appendix. September, 1918. 


The League of Nations, by Viscount Grey of Fallodon and Nicholas Mur- 
ray Butler; Labor and the League of Nations, by Ordway Tead; The 
European Commission of the Danube, by Edward Krehbiel. Address 
by President Wilson at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, 
September 27, 1918. October, ro18. 


The “Lusitania”: Opinion of Court, United States District Court, South- 
ern District of New York; In the matter of the petition of the Cunard 
Steamship Company, Limited, as owners of the Steamship “Lusitania,” 
for limitation of its liability. November, 1918. 


Official Documents Looking toward Peace, Series No. IV. Official Cor- 
respondence between the United States and (1) Austria-Hungary, (2) 
Germany, and (3) Turkey, and the Terms of Armistice accepted by 
Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Turkey. December, 1918. 


A League of Nations. Statements from the League of Free Nations Asso- 
ciation, the League to Enforce Peace, the World’s Court League, and 
the League of Nations Union; speech delivered by Felix Calonder, 
ex-President of the Swiss Confederation before the National Council 
of Switzerland, June 6, 1918; article by Sir William Collins; address 
delivered by Charles R. Van Hise, late President of the University 
of Wisconsin, at the Wisconsin State Convention of the League to 
Enforce Peace; International Organization, an annotated reading list, 
by Frederick C. Hicks. January, 1919. 


The Problems of Reconstruction: International and National, by Lindsay 
Rogers. February, I9Io. 


Russian Documents, including the Russian Constitution and the Russian 
Land Law; the Franco-Russian Alliance. March, 1919. 


The German Revolution: Documentary History of the German Revo- 
lution; Manifesto of the Spartacus Group; What Should Be Changed 
in Germany, by Charles Andler. April, 1919. 


[94] 


Special Bulletins: 


Internationalism. A list of Current Periodicals selected and annotated 
by Frederick C. Hicks. May, rors. 


Is Commerce War? By Henry Raymond Mussey. January, 1916. 


Is There a Substitute for Force in International Relations? by Suh Hu. 
Prize essay, International Polity Club Competition, awarded June, 
I916. 


Labor’s War Aims: Memorandum on War Aims, adopted by the Inter- 
Allied Labor and Socialist Conference, February 22, 1918; The Allied 
Cause is the Cause of Socialist Internationalism: Joint Manifesto of the 
Social Democratic League of America and the Jewish Socialist League. 
June, 1918. 


The Dawn in Germany? The Lichnowsky and Other Disclosures, by 
James Brown Scott. November, 1918. 


Yougoslavia, by M. I. Pupin; Declaration of Independence of the Mid- 
European Union, October 26, 1918; Declaration of Independence of 
the Czecho-Slovak Nation, October 18, 1918; Declaration of Corfu, 
July 20, 1917. January, I919. 


Problems of the Peace Conference: American Opinion and Problems of 
the Peace, an interview given to Edward Marshall by Nicholas Murray 
Butler; A French Plan for a League of Nations: report given to the 
Associated Press by Baron d’Estournelles de Constant. January, I9I9. 


The League of Nations: Proposed Constitution of the League of Nations; 
speeches delivered before the Peace Conference by members of the 
Commission on the League of Nations; addresses delivered by Presi- 
dent Wilson in Boston, February 24, 1919, and in New York, March 4, 
1919. March, 1919. : 


Copies of the above, so far as they can be spared, will be sent to libraries 
and educational institutions for permanent preservation postpaid upon receipt 
of a request addressed to the Secretary of the American Association for Inter- 
national Conciliation. 

A charge of five cents will be made for copies sent to individuals. Regular 
subscription rate twenty-five cents for one year, or one dollar for five years. 


[95] 


AMERICAN ASSOCIATION 
FOR INTERNATIONAL CONCILIATION 


Executive Commuttee 


NIcHOLAS MurRRAY BUTLER STEPHEN HENRY OLIN 
JAMES SPEYER ROBERT A. FRANKS 


JAMES L. SLAYDEN GEORGE BLUMENTHAL 


JOSEPH P. GRACE Gano DUNN 
Tuomas W. LAMONT 


Acting Secretary 


HEnrRY S. HASKELL 


Director of Interamerican Division 


Peter H. GOLDSMITH 


Correspondents 


Francis W. Hirst, London, England 
T. MryaoxkaA, Tokyo, Japan 


Organizing Secretaries for South America 


BENJAMIN GARCIA VicToRICA, American Legation, Buenos Aires 
A. G. ARAUJO JORGE, Foreign Office, Rio de Janeiro 
Juan BAUTISTA DE LAVELLE, San Pedro, 88, Lima 


COUNCIL OF DIRECTION OF THE 
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR INTERNATIONAL 
CONCILIATION 


LyMAN ABBOTT, NEW YORK 

EpwIN A. ALDERMAN, CHARLOTTESVILLE, 
VA. 

JOHN R. ALPINE, CHICAGO, ILL. 

ROBERT BACON, NEW YORK 

RICHARD BARTHOLDT, ST. Louis, Mo. 

GEORGE BLUMENTHAL, NEW YORK 

CLIFTON R. BRECKENRIDGE, EUREK 
SPRINGS, ARKANSAS ~ 

WILLIAM J. BRYAN, LINCOLN, NEBRASKA 

T. E. BURTON, CLEVELAND, OHIO 

NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER, NEW YORK 

ANDREW CARNEGIE, NEW YORK 

RIcHARD H. Dana, Boston, Mass. 

ARTHUR L. DAsHER, MACON, Ga. 

Horace E. DEMING, NEW YORK 

Gano DuNN, NEW YoRE 

CHARLES W. ELIOT, CAMBRIDGE, Mass. 

AUSTEN G. Fox, NEw YORK 

RoBERT A. FRANKS, ORANGE, N. J. 

JOHN P. FREY, CINCINNATI, OHIO 

ROBERT GARRETT, BALTIMORE, Mp. 

JosEPH P. GRACE, NEW YORK 

WILLIAM GREEN, INDIANAPOLIS, IND. 

WILLIAM J. HOLLAND, PITTSBURGH, PA. 

HAMILTON HoLt, NEw YORK 

DAVID, STARR JORDAN, STANFORD 
UNIVERSITY, CAL. 

J. H. KiRKLAND, NASHVILLE, TENN. 

Mrs. JAMES LEES LarpLaw, NEW YORK 

Tuomas W. LAMONT, NEW YORK 

ApDOLPH LEWISOHN, NEW YORK 

CLARENCE H. Mackay, NEw YORK 


THEODORE MARBURG, BALTIMORE, Mp. 
BRANDER MATTHEWS, NEW YORK 

SiLtas McBEE, NEw YorK 

GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN, PRINCETON, N. J. 
ANDREW J. MONTAGUE, RICHMOND, VA. 
Mrs. Puitip N. Moore, WASHINGTON, D. C. 
W. W. Morrow, SAN FRANCISCO, CAL. 

Levi P. Morton, NEw YorK 

STEPHEN H. Orin, NEw YorK 

Mrs. Percy V. PENNYBACKER, AUSTIN, TEX. 
HENRY S. PRITCHETT, NEW YORK 

A. V. V. RAYMOND, BUFFALO, N. Y. 

IRA REMSEN, BALTIMORE, Mp. 

JAMES ForD RHODES, Boston, Mass. 

ELInU Root, NEw YorRK 

J. G. SCHURMAN, ITHACA, N. Y. 

JAMES BROWN ScoTT, WASHINGTON, D. C. 
CHARLES HITCHCOCK SHERRILL, NEw YORK 
Mrs. SEWARD A. Simons, Los ANGELES, CAL. 
F. J. V. SkirF, Curcaco, IL. 

JAMES L. SLAYDEN, SAN ANTONIO, TEX. 
WILLIAM M. SLOANE, NEW YoRK 

JAMES SPEYER, NEw YORK 

Oscar S. STRAUS, NEW YORK 

Mrs. Mary Woop Swift, BERKELEY, CAL. 
GEORGE W. TAYLOR, DEMOPOLIS, ALA. 

O. H. T1ITTMAN, WASHINGTON, D. C. 

W. H. ToLMAn, NEw YORK 

CHARLEMAGNE TOWER, PHILADELPHIA, PA. 
EDWARD TUCK, PARIS, FRANCE 

GEORGE E. VINCENT, NEW YoRK 

WILLIAM D. WHEELWRIGHT, PORTLAND, ORE. 
Mary E. Woo.tLey, SouTH HADLEY, Mass. 














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